Health Promotion and Prevention

Explaining health problems is only useful if it helps prevent them, and this is the goal of health promotion: the process of enabling people to increase control over and improve their health, typically through education, campaigns, and changes to the social environment. Health promotion operates at different levels of prevention. Primary prevention stops disease before it starts, for example by encouraging vaccination or discouraging smoking. Secondary prevention detects and treats problems early, such as screening for cancer. Tertiary prevention manages established illness to limit its impact. Much of health psychology focuses on primary prevention through changing behavior at the population level.

A recurring debate concerns the use of fear appeals, persuasive messages that arouse fear b