BMJ  2005;330 (23 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7497.0-f

Editor's choice

Preventive medicine makes us miserable

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The old adage—prevention is better than cure—is one we have heard so often that it's hard to shift from our minds. It is intuitively powerful. It just seems to make sense. But shift it we must, for it fuels what Iona Heath, in her cogent article this week (p 954), calls "the excessive self confidence of preventive medicine," which is making us ill and miserable.

Paradoxically, says Heath, the more people are exposed to doctors and contemporary health care, including the rhetoric of preventive care, the sicker they seem to feel. Meanwhile the developing world is starved of affordable treatments. Heath's solution? A tax on preventive drugs sold in rich countries to fund treatments in poor countries, helping both sides to a better balance.

More than two thirds of people in the UK now take medicines to treat or prevent ill health or to enhance wellbeing. Heath asks . . . [Full text of this article]

Fiona Godlee, editor

(fgodlee@bmj.com)


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