Health and Illness

Health and Illness Advance To Next Lesson Patients' Bill of Rights

NOTE: Continue only after having read this and the previous lessons!

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Health and Illness

Lesson 1: Medical assistants must first understand the concepts of health and illness to intelligently and skillfully perform their duties as a member of the healthcare team. Health is the functional and/or metabolic efficiency of an organism, at any moment in time, at both the cellular and global levels. All individual organisms, from the simplest to the most complex, vary between optimum health and zero health (dead).

Lesson 1

In the medical field, health is commonly defined as an organism's ability to efficiently respond to challenges (stressors) and effectively restore and sustain a "state of balance," known as homeostasis. Exercise, nutrition, and hygiene are important aspects of sustaining good health. Also the physical, mental, and emotional condition of a person contribute greatly to the normal and proper performance of vital functions. Not only is health the absence of disease or disability; health is also a state of soundness of the body, mind, and spirit. Conversely, the concept of illness includes conditions often accompanied by pain or discomfort that inhibit a human being's ability to physically, mentally, or emotionally perform in a normal and proper manner.

Abnormal conditions of the body or mind that cause discomfort, dysfunction, or distress to the person afflicted, or those in contact with the person can be deemed an illness. Sometimes the term is used broadly to include injuries, disabilities, syndromes, infections, symptoms, deviant behaviors, and atypical variations of structure and function, while in other contexts these may be considered distinguishable categories. A pathogen or infectious agent is a biological agent that causes disease or illness to its host. A passenger virus is a virus that simply hitchhikes in the body of a person or infects the body without causing symptoms, illness or disease. Foodborne illness or food poisoning is any illness resulting from the consumption of food contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, toxins, viruses, prions or parasites.

In most cultures, when people need assistance in maintaining their health, dealing with illness, or coping with problems related to health and illness, they seek assistance from personnel specialized in the fields of healthcare.

Physicians, physician assistants, nurses, and medical assistants are frequently referred to as the core team. Obviously, individual members of the team use their skills differently, depending upon their personal, professional, and technical training, specialty, credentials, scope of practice, and experience. Nevertheless, and despite the differences in clinical expertise, they all share one common objective: to respond to patient's health needs. The overall goal of this response is to assist these patients to maintain, sustain, and restore, or rehabilitate a physical or psychological function.

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