Health, well-being, and measuring the burden of disease
Hausman DM
Department of Philosophy, University
of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison,
WI USA
Population Health
Metrics 2012, 10:13 (1 August 2012)
Available online at: http://bit.ly/MAOZNN
“….This essay asks
whether the global burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors (GBD) should be
measured in terms of their consequences for health, as maintained by most of
those who are attempting to measure the GBD, or in terms of their consequences
for well-being, as argued by John Broome. It answers that the burden of disease
should be understood in terms of the consequences of disease for health, and it
defends the wider efforts to measure health by those who are in other ways
skeptical of the project of measuring the global burden of diseases GBD….”
“……Many problems
remain, and different measures may be needed for different purposes. Yet the prospects
for assessing the burden of disease in terms of the consequences of disease, injuries,
and risk factors for health itself are not so bleak as they may have appeared
earlier in this essay. Evaluating health states by the weighted average of the
values of their tokens or by the value they have in a standard context is a
compromise that grows out of the impossibility of quantifying health itself.
But it is a compromise worth making, because (in contrast to Broome’s
proposal) some measure of health itself is needed for policy purposes….”
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