The health indicators of the population are worst in the whole Central and Eastern European region, and thus in Hungary as well. The health status of Hungarians is not possible, it is not a unique phenomenon. The state of health of the Hungarian society is one of the worst in the European Union. To advance the understanding of the situation, it is necessary to conduct complex interdisciplinary studies that combine health and social science models.

In our study, we present a complex approach to health, its social embeddedness, with the aim of providing a theoretical basis for a study we have designed to target Hungarian health characteristics.

The theoretical overview emphasizes the context of the definition of health used in certain disciplines of the social sciences, the presentation of the explanatory factors of health, and the theses and models. Outlining our present work and future research cannot be without tracking the changes that have taken place that determine health, so we will first analyze this. In laying the theoretical foundations, we return to the complex approach to health, in which we present the presentation of biomedical and bio-psycho-social models in detail, and then we describe the economic and social models of health. We also deal with health determinants that determine the health of the individual and society.