Health, well-being, and measuring the burden of disease

Description:
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

How to cite:

Hausman DM. Health, well-being, and measuring the burden of disease. Population Health Metrics.  2012; 10:13. Available at: http://www.pophealthmetrics.com/content/pdf/1478-7954-10-13.pdf

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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