Home  Publications Essays Favorites on Quality of Life |
|
|
Favorites on Quality of Life |
A 400-Word History of Quality of Life in 401 Words
Dick Joyce, PhD
|
|
Brief accounts are notoriously much more difficult to write than long ones. A 400-word history of Quality of Life (QoL) is impossible. Hence 401.
The concept of QoL is frequently held to have been first put forward by architects or other social planners in the 1920s
(see, for example, Maune et al, 2005). However, it was obviously familiar, although not under that name, to Molière, Ben Jonson and their audiences. Rosser (1993), citing Herodotus (5th century BCE), put its Babylonian origins much earlier (Hammurabi, 17th century BCE) and its Egyptian origins earlier still (Imhotep, 27th century BCE).
Nearer our own time, millions of papers published since the 1960s purport to have invented, defined or made use of methods for determining QoL (Google: 193,000,000 hits; or Advanced Google Scholar: 1,760,000 hits; both accessed 17.02.2010). This plethora is partly due on one hand to the term’s application to economic, epidemiological or other social phenomena (in such cases it is better called Health Status, HS) and on the other to the far smaller number of studies on individuals (see Guyatt et al, 1989; Ruta et al, 1994; and the Dublin group: O’Boyle et al, 1992; Joyce, 1991).
The last of this group considers that QoL is what the individual says it is (better still, but impossible to know, what he/she
tells him/herself it is).
Within the last thirty or forty years, there have been increasingly thoughtful attempts to combine the assessment of QoL, Health Related QoL (HRQoL) and HS in instruments that record Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs). A difficult but basic and as yet unsolved problem common to the field is that of defining the period over which information relevant to present or past experience is collected (to-day, the previous week or longer), predicted, or desired. This has certain analogies
to a problem in the description of personality, and draws attention to“trait”, “state” and even “fate” aspects of QoL.
With the rapid development of neurological tracking methods (e.g., Smart et al, 2008) already sensitive enough to have determined “yes”/”no” responses in those with “locked-in syndrome” as well as the transmitter-agents for “risk” and “reward”, one may expect emphasis upon individual QoL, as well as attention to theory (Barofsky, in preparation) to increase.
Meanwhile, the time-honoured enquiry “How are we to-day?” is probably still the measure of QoL most commonly employed in clinical practice. |
|
