Stefan Topolski

• University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School

Barry Saver and colleagues caution against the use of process and performance metrics as health care quality measures in the United States.

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to evaluate the veracity of a theoretically derived model of health that describes a non-linear trajectory of health from birth to death with available population data sets.Methods The distribution of mortality by age is directly related to health at that age, thus health approximates 1/mortality. The inverse of...

This essay examines the notions of knowledge, truth and certainty as they apply to medical research and patient care. The human body does not behave in mechanistic but rather complex adaptive ways; thus, its behaviour to challenges is non-deterministic. This insight has important ramifications for experimental studies in health care and their stati...

The previous three chapters have explored the dimensions of health through different lenses—the multiplicative agents of one’s health potential, the subjective experience arising from sense-making, and a functional state that allows for survival and reproduction—the struggle for life. Together, they provide the basis for a congruent systems-based d...

What is health? How do we understand it? Where does it come from? Why does it go away? Health is not like sunlight, for instance, which we can see, nor is health like the sun’s warmth which we can touch. While philosophical dualism such as Descartes’ can put doubt to our senses’ feelings of hot and cold, of light and dark, health itself remains ins...

Doctors often use theory to inform medical practice. The current bio-psycho-social model of health may be advanced still further with theoretical rigour. Traditional fields of thermodynamics and newer fields of non-linear dynamics including chaos theory and complex systems science can inform our understanding of the complexity of human health, illn...