Introduction Today, our understanding of health and disease is dominated by curative and preventive models. While effective in managing diseases and prevention, this approach has led to an increasing medicalization of life. Medications and medical interventions are employed not only to treat diseases but also to prevent them in the absence of evident symptoms, as seen with the use of statins, antihypertensives, and vaccines. However, this model overlooks a crucial aspect, well-documented in scientific evidence: a healthy lifestyle can extend life expectancy in good health more effectively than any medical intervention. Greater attention to the demedicalization of life offers significant social, individual, and economic advantages. What is Health Ecology? Health ecology is the discipline that examines the interactions between humans, the environment, and lifestyle to promote health and prevent diseases. Unlike preventive medicine, which focuses o...
Since its founding, the World Health Organization (WHO) has set the goal of ensuring the highest possible level of health for all populations. Despite the general increase in well-being, there has been a rise in chronic diseases, once considered marginal, which are now treated with increasingly effective medicines. At the same time, the causes of these diseases have been identified, as well as the behaviors and lifestyles that preserve health. However, the increase in life expectancy has not translated into a proportional increase in healthy life years. Chronic diseases are not only responsible for the rise in days of illness but also for the current crisis facing medicine in developed countries. In this context, health ecology emerges as a new scientific discipline focused solely on preserving health rather than curing diseases. By using diseases as indicators of true human and social progress, this discipline seeks a proactive approach to calculate the healthy life expectancy ass...