Physiological Rights: Definition and Scope

Physiological rights are the rights of every person to have their essential biological parameters measured, maintained, and restored — regardless of whether those parameters fall within the clinical threshold of recognised disease.

They rest on a simple but radical premise: the human organism has quantifiable needs. When those needs are chronically unmet — whether through inaccessible testing, unreimbursed correction, or institutional indifference — a rights violation occurs, not merely a clinical gap.

What Makes Them Distinct

Physiological rights differ from the right to health in three structural ways:

1. Object: The right to health concerns access to care systems. Physiological rights concern the actual biological state of the individual — measurable levels of nutrients, hormones, and vital substrates.
2. Standard of obligation: The right to health imposes an obligation of means on States. Physiological rights impose an obligation of results: that each person’s measurable parameters be brought within a range compatible with full function.
3. Threshold: The right to health is typically triggered by pathology. Physiological rights are triggered by deviation from physiological integrity — including subclinical deficiencies that cause suffering and functional limitation without meeting disease classification criteria.

The Justiciability Argument

For a right to be justiciable — actionable before a court or oversight body — it must be:

• Defined: what exactly is owed?
• Measurable: can compliance be assessed?
• Attributable: can a responsible party be identified?

Physiological rights satisfy all three conditions. A serum ferritin level, a 25-OH vitamin D concentration, a TSH value — these are not clinical opinions. They are objective measurements. When an institution systematically refuses to test, correct, or reimburse correction of such parameters, the failure is identifiable, documentable, and attributable.

This is what distinguishes physiological rights from vague aspirational health rights: they are operationalisable.

Scope: What Physiological Rights Cover

Physiological rights apply to any parameter where:

• Scientific consensus establishes a functional range
• Deviation from that range produces measurable harm to capacity, cognition, mood, or longevity
• Correction is technically feasible but systematically withheld or inaccessible

Current documented domains include: essential micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, fatty acids), hormonal balance (thyroid, sex hormones, cortisol rhythms), and substrate availability (glucose regulation, amino acid sufficiency).

Relation to Existing Rights Frameworks

Physiological rights do not replace existing instruments. They operate as a concrete layer beneath the right to health (ICESCR Art. 12), the right to life (ICCPR Art. 6), and the right to benefit from scientific progress (ICESCR Art. 15). Where those instruments speak in systemic and aspirational terms, physiological rights specify what is owed to the individual body — and when that obligation has been breached.