Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rome (Fides) – Recently Aris-Sanità magazine issued by the Associazione Religiosa delle Istituzioni Socio-Sanitarie comprising Church-run health-care institutes in Italy published a study on Ethics and Health by professor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, an expert in Bio-ethics, Director of the Agostino Gemelli Institute of Bio-ethics.
The right to health is an important conquest of modern times. Progress in science and technology has given the human person more control over life and health. Therefore we can and we must exercise a right which cannot be renounced to ensure that this new control is used for the benefit of mankind, with respect for human dignity and integrity of every individual.
Professor De Paula presents ethics and health as components of the human person: ethics concerns behaviour, decisions, objectives; health is a precious inalienable good which allows the person to live life to the full.
Within the ambit of ethics and health there is a first twofold indispensable task to establish a new and more precise definition of health, which cannot fail to centre on– the suffering person – who must be helped to recuperate the best condition in order to express the best of self as a human person. Moreover the right to health must be re-defined as a fundamental right of every person and not discriminated as access to services indispensable for the defence of health itself.
A healthy person, professor De Paula concludes, is not only one with complete physical mental and social well being, firstly because this would be a privilege for a few; secondly because the person aspires to something more: no level of well being is totally satisfying. The healthy person is able to exercise the vital potential which they possess as a living organism of a personal nature. The sick person is prevented from self expression due to some pathological cause, of a physical or psychic nature, which he or she cannot remove, at least not without assistance.
(AP) (30/1/2004 Fides Service; lines:32 words:397)
