Disease, illness, sickness, health, healing and wholeness: exploring some elusive concepts.

Concepts such as disease and health can be diYcult to define precisely. Part of the reason for this is that they embody value judgments and are rooted in metaphor. The precise meaning of terms like health, healing and wholeness is likely to remain elusive, because the disconcerting openness of the outlook gained from experience alone resists the reduction of first-person judgments (including those of religion) to third-person explanations (including those of science). (J Med Ethics: Medical Humanities 2000;26:9–17)