Developing epidemiologic studies of people's lived experience: the Swiss Spinal Cord Injury Cohort Study as a case in point.

摘要

"Non enim vivere bonum est sed bene vivere" (What is good is not just living, but living well [Seneca, Epistulae Morales 70, 4]). This notion by Seneca describes the two main societal goals in relation to people's health. The first goal is survival, the challenge to make it possible for everyone in society to live as long as humanly possible. There are two familiar health strategies that can be used to achieve this goal: prevention and cure. Social progress and modern medicine have made it possible for more and more people in developed societies to enjoy a life span approaching the biologic limit of human nature. The hope for the future is that this gift can be shared with low- and medium-resource countries. A telling example of this is the increase in survival among persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) in the last three decades. The second goal is that all people enjoy a good quality-of-life throughout their lifetime or, from the perspective of human rights, that all people are able to exercise the full range of opportunities throughout their life.