Question

Preventative medicine - vaccinations vs. good nutrition/hygiene

Answer 1

Preventive medicine focuses on the health of individuals, communities, and defined populations. Its goal is to protect, promote, and maintain health and well being and to prevent disease, disability, and death.

Good nutrition is an important part of leading a healthy lifestyle. Combined with physical activity, your diet can help you to reach and maintain a healthy weight, reduce your risk of chronic diseases and promote your overall health.

The primordial prevention of disease is the fetal and neo-natal period, which is fundamental, as this period has the largest influence on health later in life.

Primary prevention refers to efforts to eliminate health or functional problems at their source that is, preventing their occurrence or to procedures that reduce the incidence of disease. Primary prevention is important to increase the animal’s disease resistance and avoid disease risk factors through vaccination, good hygiene, housing, nutrition and good management. Acting as an obstacle, preventive measures, carried out to deter expected aggression by hostile forces. Preventing or slowing the course of an illness or disease, prophylactic, preventive medicine, preventive health care.

Health promotion and disease prevention programs focus on keeping people healthy. Health promotion programs aim to engage and empower individuals and communities to choose healthy behaviors, and make changes that reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases and other morbidities.

Primary prevention consists of traditional health promotion and specific protection. Health promotion activities are current, non-clinical life choices. Eating nutritious meals and exercising daily, both prevent disease and create a sense of overall well being. Preventing disease and creating overall well being, prolongs our life expectancy. Health promotional activities do not target a specific disease or condition but rather promote health and well being on a very general level. On the other hand, specific protection targets a type or group of diseases and complements the goals of health promotion.

Food is very much the most basic tool in preventive health care. The first national survey to include questions about ability was to pay for food. Difficulty with paying for food, medicine, or both is a problem. If better food options were available through food banks, soup kitchens, and other resources for low income people, obesity and the chronic conditions that come along with it would be better controlled.

Secondary prevention is the early diagnosis and prompt treatment of disease. This will prevent the disease from becoming more severe and prevent complications.

Secondary prevention deals with latent diseases and attempts to prevent an asymptomatic disease from progressing to symptomatic disease. Certain diseases can be classified as primary or secondary. This depends on definitions of what constitutes a disease, in general, primary prevention addresses the root cause of a disease or injury, whereas secondary prevention aims to detect and treat a disease early on. Secondary prevention consists of early diagnosis and prompt treatment to contain the disease and prevent its spread to other individuals, and disability limitation to prevent potential future complications and disabilities from the disease.

Tertiary prevention is responsible treatment aimed at trying to restore health of sick animals to try to bring them back into production.

Tertiary prevention attempts to reduce the damage caused by symptomatic disease by focusing on mental, physical, and social rehabilitation. Unlike secondary prevention, which aims to prevent disability, the objective of tertiary prevention is to maximize the remaining capabilities and functions of an already disabled patient. Goals of tertiary prevention include, preventing pain and damage, halting progression and complications from disease, and restoring the health and functions of the individuals affected by disease.

There is no general consensus as to whether or not preventive healthcare measures are cost effective, but they increase the quality of life dramatically. There are varying views on what constitutes a good investment. Some argue that preventive health measures should save more money than they cost, when factoring in treatment costs in the absence of such measures. Others argue in favor of good value or conferring significant health benefits even if the measures do not save money. Preventive health services are often described as one entity though they comprise a myriad of different services, each of which can individually lead to net costs, savings, or neither. Greater differentiation of these services is necessary to fully understand both the financial and health effects.