PREVENTIVE MEDICINE AND HEALTH

?What Is Preventive Medicine??

Preventive medicine is?the practice of promoting preventive health care to improve patient well-being and to maintain health.?The goal is to ultimately prevent disease, disability, and death.

The aim of preventive medicine is the absence of disease, either by preventing the occurrence of a disease or by halting a disease and averting resulting complications after its onset.?

Preventive medicine can be practised by governmental agencies, primary care physicians in coordination with all speciality care physicians and the individuals actively participating.

This requires integration of?modern technologies allowing early detection and personalised?interventions (as required) supported by science and integration of valid alternative approaches- e.g. Ayurveda , Traditional medicine.

Preventive pluridisciplinary (multi-speciality) medical primary centres?(infrastructures) might be seen as translation of concept into reality where benefit overweight extensively costs for all.

Primary prevention comprises the "manipulation" of environment -?clean water supply, nutrition, clean air ..etc. but also early diagnostic and mitigation is not limited only to oncology/cancer, than "adapted"?immunization against infectious diseases.. etc.

Secondary prevention includes measures to prevent the spread of disease to non-affected individuals, identification of those in the early stages of a disease process when treatment should be most effective, and lastly the prevention or delay of the consequences of clinically advanced disease by both therapy and rehabilitation.?

?Most of people will agree that Prevention, in medicine as in anything else, is better than?Cure - but what is Prevention??

Than, if you ask healthy people what they want most, you will get as many answers as there are people.?Ask someone when She/He is ill or has an inkling of premature death and you will get the truth.?She/He wants more than anything else to be.. Healthy.?

This leads to the question: what is Health??To most people health is the absence of disease. The aim of preventive medicine is to achieve this absence of disease and to guarantee well- being.?

To accomplish such prevention does not imply that less effort WE should be spent on making people well = to treat once they are ill, but that additional effort is required to keep people well= to maintain health.

The world runs on healthy people, yet the healthy are not always "health conscious" or "aware" of their need to be free of disease and therefore it is difficult for the majority to realize the "value" of preventive medicine.

Huxley outlined the importance of prevention in his novel Island during a conversation between two of the characters on his island, Pala: "So you think our medicine's pretty primitive?" "That's the wrong word. It's 50 per cent terrific and 50 per cent non-existent . . . Fantastic operations - but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing.?And it's the same all the way along the line.?

Alpha Plus for patching you up when you've started to fall apart but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy". Primary and Secondary Prevention

Preventive medicine includes all measures which limit progression of disease at any stage of its course...

Preventive medicine depends also on knowing how disease begins and how the individual proceeds through the "normal" to the "diseased" state.?

Therefore preventive medicine demands new facts and the efficient application of known ones, both of which are epidemiologic processes. Epidemiology is the basic science of preventive medicine. The word epidemiology is derived from the Greek words for "upon" and "people". An epidemic is "something that happens to a number of people"; epidemiology is the study of the things that happened, whether it be a disease or another factor in simplified manner.?

The object of epidemiological studies is to establish the cause of a condition or the association of a condition with particular characteristics of the affected individuals or their environment where Individuals ("Genome" - "Microbiome"- "Immunity"...) - Animals - Environement as such are in close interplay..

Ultimately, it is "all about people" and preventive medicine requires action taken by people for themselves. But they need to be appropriately educated to undertake such action - and to achieve this motivation and awareness is one of the important piece of puzzle and role of prevention and preventive medicine...