It is not possible to prevent or avoid all of the possible diseases, injuries, and limitations that can occur in a given life. The opportunity grows from the realization that it is not necessary to prevent everything bad in order to live a rich, full life. The second step toward the right question reframes health as a social challenge dependent on strong partnerships among the many institutional components of a given community. As long as health is understood as a long list of problems that demand discrete and specialized services, most of the social structure find little role to play. Indeed, it is defined right out of the picture.
Health ethics devolves to managing access to paid services.
When health is reframed as an opportunity that grows from resilience, the menu of relevant health assets expands exponentially. 3 Health ethics and strategy, for example, move toward developing relationships between people and social systems that promote health. This new question raises important, strategic questions for all institutions in a community. One of the most intriguing challenges is the strategic implication for the relationship between health systems and religious groups. In recent years, the relationship between individual spirituality and healing has entered mainstream medical discussion.