Good relationships for a good health

In 1948 The World Health Organization defined health as “physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity …”, already considering a subjective dimension in the assessment of the health status and highlight a global evaluation, not only a medical one, of the quality of life.

In 2011 the Louis Bolk Institute researchers Machteld Huber and Marja van Vliet suggested a new definition: “Health as the ability to adapt and self-manage, in light of the physical, emotional and social challenges of life“.

From a reductionist medical approach centered on the illness according to the chain illness – therapy – healing, we moved towards a systemic approach where the person is in the middle and where the problem identification aims to improve and keep a good quality of life.

According to this approach, very interesting are studies and researches proving that our relationships and how happy we are in them have a significant impact on our health.

The “Grant Study” of Harvard University, started in 1938 and still going on, shows that the creation and the support of authentic and long-lasting relationships and embracing the community influence fundamentally our chances to be happy and help us to live a long, healthy and whole life.

In 1938, the first participants to the research have been sampled: 268 sophomores at the Harvard College, future managers and intellectuals. The second branch of the study started few years later involving young people from the poor neighborhoods of Boston.

Millions of data about the variables that influence the physical and psychophysical human wellbeing have been collected (interviews, medical data, neuro-images scans and DNA analysis).

The study highlights that the quality of the intimate relationships and of the human connections impact in a very sensitive way on the chance to have a long and healthy life.

“When we collected all we knew on them after 50 years, their cholesterol levels were not the ones predicting how they would have aged…it was how they were satisfied in their relationships. The people who were more satisfied in their relationships when 50 years old, were the ones healthier when 80 years old” says Robert Waldinger, director of Harvard Study of Adult Development, Psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical Schooland psychoanalyst at The Boston Psychoanalytic Society . “We thought that the major forecast of a long life was having long-lived parents. It turned out instead that the lifestyle choices that people choose in their middle age are a more important factor to forecast how long and howhealthy they will leave. The fact that the good life is build on good relationship is an idea worthy to be spread”.

 

For more information about the Grant Study, look in the Health and Medicine section of the Harvard Gazette website: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/

 

Photo credits: Stefano Butturini