Relation of Health Promotion to Health Education and Public Health
A popular notion of health promotion is of lean and ruddy people, alone, grimly adhering to a regimen of health-directed behavior to reduce their risks of premature death, disease and even aging. Important as such goal-oriented activity may be for that small minority of individuals, and much as health education can point with pride to its development in recent years, goal-oriented activity is but a small piece of the more pervasive behavior has to do with patterns, and organizzations. This more pervasive behavior has to do with patterns and conditions of living-housing, eating, playing, workind and just plain loafing-most of which lie outside the realm of the health sector and are not consciously health-directed.
The previous edition of this book adhered to a definition oh health education that insisted on voluntary change in behavior and hence limited its scope to conscious health-directed behavior. Health education could be shown to work most directly, effectively, and humanely when people were clearly oriented to solve a discrete and immediate behavioral or health problem of importance to them. Patient education and self-care education (in which people are motivated to cure or control a disease), Immunization programs (in which people want to avoid an imminent threat), screening programs (in which people seek a specific diagnosis or reassurance), smoking cessation programs (in which people want a quit), family planning programs (in which people want to prevent or delay a pregnancy), and other highly targeted programs were advanced by the application of the framework and procedures outlined by the diagnostic approach of the previous edition.
As that book went to press in 1979, the Surgeon Generals Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention challenged the American public and profesional health community to examine more critically our routine and usually unpremeditated health-related behaviors and the community conditions of living that account for ever 50 percent of the causes of premature death and to examine the policies supporting such behaviors andd living conditions. Among these, the most important were substance misuse and addiction (including tobacco and alcohol), poor diet, sedentary work and leisure, and stress-related conditions (including suicide, violence, and reckless behavior). These behavioral and life-style risk factors were estimated to account for 40-70 percent of all premature deaths, a third of all cases of acute disability, and two thirds of all cases of chronic disability. Sexual behavior was considered impotant in relation to teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, but it took on much greater importance as a cause of death after the emergence of the AIDS epidemic.
Source :
Lawrence w. Green and Marshall W. Kreuter, 1991, Health Promotion Planning An Educational and Environmental Approach, Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, California.
