Holostasis: Health as Personal Orientation in an Anthropological Framework

Contemporary health care discourse increasingly recognises the need to move beyond purely functional and optimisation-based models of health. Yet prevailing approaches often fragment the human person into biological, psychological, and-when included-spiritual domains, without a coherent anthropological basis capable of integrating them. This article introduces Holostasis as an anthropological framework in which health is understood as personal orientation sustained through change-a stability-in-change proper to personal existence, distinct from equilibrium-based or functional conceptions. Rather than proposing a physiological mechanism or an operative clinical model, Holostasis is articulated at a pre-clinical and epistemological level, offering a conceptual criterion for rethinking health and illness from the unity of the person. Drawing on philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of medicine, the paper distinguishes Holostasis from regulatory notions such as homeostasis and allostasis, as well as from additive holistic and integrative approaches. It develops an account of health as continuity of meaning, orientation toward truth, and relational integrity, including conditions of vulnerability, illness, and functional limitation. By foregrounding the therapeutic relationship and the limits of optimisation paradigms, Holostasis is proposed as an open interpretative contribution to contemporary debates on personhood, health, and person-centred care.