One of the central features of the new primary care White Paper is the plan to provide free medical check-ups.1 The Life Check programme aims ‘to help people — particularly at critical points in their lives — to assess their own risk of ill-health’, by focusing on ‘major risk factors’, such as obesity, smoking, binge drinking, mental illness and stress, and sexually-transmitted infections. The White Paper emphasises the role of education in promoting awareness of the risks of disease and of the measures deemed necessary to achieve and sustain health from infancy onwards.
But if health becomes the goal of life — as in the terms of the WHO definition ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing’ — then it becomes an unattainable ideal, a state of perfection that may be striven for but never reached. From …