ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interrelationship of health problem patterns and frames of reference for both defining and measuring health. It explains why mortality and morbidity rates, by themselves, no longer serve to assess a population’s health status. The chapter presents a society’s predominant disease patterns and the associated measures necessary to describe and explain the population’s health status. It assesses the role of some selected sociomedical health indicators in the current developmental process of formulation of health status indicators. Prior to the consideration of a classification schema for health status indicators, it is helpful to examine the deficiencies of mortality and morbidity rates as health assessors for the larger portion of the population in developed societies. Accompanying each era’s and group’s predominant patternings of disease or health problems is the appropriate selection or construction of health indicators. The medical and sanitarian therapeutic technology is specifically directed at the underlying mechanism of disease.
