 All right, my intrepid learners, today we're going to get started with a course that I'm really excited about. It's about global health. And when we're talking about health, one of the most important things we might need to do is think about what it actually means. It's a word that we say a lot. We use the word healthy all the time. You hear it all the time. People are always talking about it. But what does it actually mean? And it actually really became clear to me when I was getting ready for this lesson. I was sitting and talking to my roommates about it who were both studying medicine. And I told them what I was doing and they're like, well, that's actually pretty hard, isn't it? And they're right because it is really hard to define what a healthy person is and what a not so healthy person is. And traditionally, that sort of hard question has been asked with a sort of dichotomy. A dichotomy is when you have two things and you have healthy on one side and dead on the other side in this case. And so people have always kind of said, well, you know, this person's like over here or maybe this person's over here, whatever the case. And that kind of gets a little bit at what health is. I mean, it's kind of describing it, but it's not quite exact enough. So how about we kind of maybe take a look at what maybe is a better way to think about this. So to do that, let's draw our person here. I'm going to draw a blue person. There we go. And this blue person has a mind, has a body. And I think the best description that I've found of what a healthy person is or the simplest is the person who is free from illness, free from injury, and free from pain. So in both mind and body they are free from illness, injury, and pain. It means they've got a good thing going. Life is treating them well and their body feels good. It's doing everything it needs to do and their mind is doing the same thing. And that's a really hard, I mean, the lines between sick and healthy are obviously a little hard. And we can also replace dead over here with sick as well because in a way it's not necessarily always going to be that clear. Maybe sick would lay on this chart here in the middle, something like that. But obviously it's more complicated than that because you could have an incredible body but your mind could be giving you trouble. And then there's another sort of recipe, another element to this recipe that I would like to add which is maybe something that you don't always read very often or think about. But relationships are also really important and they're very connected obviously with the mind, you know, how your relationships are going often has to do with your mind. But relationships are also one of the most important things in our life and if they're not going well then maybe it's kind of hard to be healthy. So having a healthy life and living a healthy life is about having a mind, a body and relationships that are all working for you. Alright, so let's maybe take a look at the levels that health sort of occurs at. And we'll do that by drawing our blue person here, it's not a blue man, it's a blue person. And we've got our personal level of health again. That again has to do with things like your hygiene, with your nutrition, with your freedom from illness or injury. All that sort of stuff is encapsulated in your personal health. And a lot more, again, relationships for example, being another thing. And then when you take more than one person and group them together then you've got a, and I am just like repeating the same thing that I just wrote, why am I doing that? Population. So you are a part of a population of some kind. And I'm going to group it together with another word that we hear a lot and we'll be talking about in this course a lot is the community. And a lot of times this population and community level is sort of used as a way of comparing different groups of people. It's kind of something that researchers use a lot and people who are doing action and communities use a lot. And so you have a group of people, let's say we have the blue people over here and we've got the green people over here. Maybe researchers are taking a look at a certain group of people and trying to say, this one is healthier than the other one. Maybe the green people are healthier in this case. And then trying to figure out, well why? What's the reason for that? It's kind of important. So that's the population level. And that's just groups of individuals. And then you've got the public level and let me find a cool color for public. You've got public health. And public health is sort of an extension. It's just a broader term that basically means the same thing as the layer below it in a way, except that it has a lot more to do with things like policy, which we'll probably be not talking about too much in this course, but it definitely has more to do with policy and action. And it's with even bigger groups of people. So we're talking like really, really, really big numbers of red people and whatever. This color is teal people and blue people, lots and lots and lots of them. And often even sort of putting them in groups themselves. And we're kind of using a clashing color here. I need to find a better color. So even putting these people in groups and comparing them to even other groups. And the public level has a lot to do with how you run your society and how you spend your money. So you've kind of got like this set of problems, maybe here. And then you've got your set of resources like you've got this much money and you've got this many doctors. And public policy is often trying to figure out how do we spend money on this and on this so that maybe we can solve a problem and put doctors working on this and researchers working on that. And how can we organize our entire society to fix these problems and kind of like get rid of them as best as we can. So that is kind of what public policy is about. And then global health, which we're talking about in this course. Really important to understand what global health means. And global health for the purposes of what we're talking about in this class it's just basically sort of encapsulating all of this. And it's looking at each one of these levels in different places around the world and trying to understand the problems and the solutions that work best. And global health takes a look at everything. It takes a look at everything all the way down to the personal level. Also looks at community and public health. And actually public global health is in many ways like public health but sort of on a much bigger scale. Public health is often a country. Global health is for the whole world. And so when we're talking about global health we'll be talking about big epidemics. We'll be talking about then the solutions that you have for those epidemics. And we'll be talking about huge populations of people, big groups of people that we'll be comparing against other big groups of people and trying to find solutions that will make everybody healthy. Because in the end global health is really all about making a world in which everyone, everyone has the health that they need to be successful and happy. And we're going to be talking about all these different levels in the course all sort of through the lens I guess you could say of global health. And we're going to start right here in this lesson and move all the way through tons of other stuff. I hope that you enjoy it. And that you come on back to alversity.org.