Health Behaviors

Abstract

Alcmaeon, one of the founders of Greek medicine in the early part of the fifth century b.c., referred to health as a state of organismic balance and disease as a rupture of that balance (Watson, 1978, pp. 11–13). Throughout history, the notion of distress or disease due to an imbalance of some external or internal forces acting on the organism was commonly accepted. Hippocrates’s theory of humors also emphasized the importance of balance in the maintenance of health (Hothersall, 1990, p. 12).