Salutogenesis

Salutogenesis is the study of the origins (genesis) of health (salus) and focuses on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease (pathogenesis). More specifically, the "salutogenic model" was originally concerned with the relationship between health, stress, and coping through a study of Holocaust survivors. Despite going through the dramatic tragedy of the Holocaust, some survivors were able to thrive later in life. The discovery that there must be powerful health causing factors led to the development of salutogenesis. The term was coined by Aaron Antonovsky (1923–1994), a professor of medical sociology. The salutogenic question posed by Aaron Antonovsky is, "What makes people healthy?" He observed that stress is ubiquitous, but not all individuals have negative health outcomes in response to stress. Instead, some people achieve health despite their exposure to potentially disabling stress factors. Antonovsky identifies the dominant paradigm of Western medicine as pathogenic, which in turn leads to an understanding of health as dichotomous – one is either healthy or sick. For a salutogenic approach, the ease/dis-ease continuum, rather than the health-disease dichotomy is appropriate. Antonovsky identified four criteria to be used in determining a person's position on the continuum: pain, functional limitation, prognostic implication, and action implication; each ranging from “not-at-all” at the ease end to “severe/life-threatening/requiring intervention” at the dis-ease end. Later he wrote: “A continuum model, which sees each of us, at a given point in time, somewhere along a ‘health/dis-ease’ continuum is, I believe, a more powerful and more accurate conception of reality, one which opens the way for a strong theory of health promotion. In his 1979 book, Health, Stress and Coping, Antonovsky described a variety of influences that led him to the question of how people survive, adapt, and overcome in the face of even the...