Does “Health Promotion” Really Promote Health?

Abstract

In his comment on Victor Fuch's essay, the late Alvan Feinstein raised the question of whether government-sponsored programs of "health promotion" are always good for well-being.Like many other discussions of the government's role in "health promotion," Victor Fuchs' excellent paper 1 makes the assumption that "promotion" is a well-established entity, so that the main job now is to disseminate it to everyone, at reasonable cost. Since the history of medicine and public health contains many splendid triumphs that followed a long array of errors and blunders, it is always important, in any era of medicine, to consider the possibility that the establishment beliefs are not always correct. 2 The idea of "promotion" is itself relataively new. Health and health care have always involved various forms of personal or societal interventions, but the idea of "promotion" usually refers to many new types of prevention, administered to apparently healthy people, that will help retain health and thwart illness. Until about 1920,

Bridging the Culture Chasm: Ensuring that Consumers are Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

“…We selected these domains for two reasons. First, much of the extant work in these domains has been inspired by literature coming from an economics-based perspective (e.g., Bloom, Canning, and Graham 2003; Feinstein 2005). Hinging on assumptions of consumer rationality, in general, this work encourages free-market policies and cautions against interventions that might hinder them.…”