Measuring “Complementary” Health Status: Immunity, Personal Constitution, and Their Relation to Health satisfaction

Contexts: Unlike alternative therapies that have received intensive attention recently, “alternative health concepts” have hardly been examined. In addition to the widely applied orthodox indicator – health status, two alternative indicators: personal constitution (“tizhi” in Chinese) and immunity are included in this study.

Objectives: Present the distribution of three health indicators, the relationships among them, their association with individuals' socio-demographic characteristics, and their relative contributions to one's health satisfaction.

Design: Data for this study are derived from a nation–wide telephone survey which interviewed household adults aged 20 to 70 during November to December in 1998. Except personal constitution being measured by an open-ended question, health status, immunity, and health satisfaction were all measured by self-reported 5-point Likert scales.

Results: Health status was most positively rated by the participants, and also most sensitive to socio-demographic distinctions. While virtually all could report their own health status, 7.8% and 21.6% didn't know the meaning of or could not identify the status of their immunity or personal constitution, respectively. The three health indicators are moderately related to each other (ñ=0.34~0.46), and all make significant contribution to health satisfaction.

Conclusions: The two alternative health concepts: immunity and personal constitution have potential to reflect individual's overall wellness and predict one's health satisfaction. Alternative health measures, therefore, can reduce the “residual” derived from orthodox health measures like subjective health status. More culturally sensitive and lay-oriented health concepts should be incorporated into public health assessments to assure the validity of health measurement.