About the difference between preventing disease and promoting good health.
In the presentation of this website, I write that the key concept is HEALTH COMPETENCE, i.e. the ability to stay healthy not only in the sense of avoiding illness/injury but also to feel good and maintain good health and a high quality of life. Health literacy has two components. The first is what most people associate with health care, namely preventive competence, which is about understanding harmful influences and developing a skill in managing risk situations so that you do not unnecessarily expose yourself to things that make you ill. The second part is called promotive competence, which is about understanding one’s needs and developing the ability to expose oneself sufficiently to things that make body and mind function well. Unfortunately, the promotive component is unknown to most people, which is unfortunate because it is at least as important as taking preventive measures! But this is not really surprising, because if you look at the information on wellness that comes from health authorities and health counsellors on the web and in books, 99% of it is preventive advice, i.e. what to avoid to be spared from disease.
To try to offset this imbalance to some extent, I will focus more on promotive health literacy in this blog and throughout the website. Not because preventive competence is unimportant – as a doctor, I am extremely well versed in the importance of taking disease-preventing measures – but to increase awareness of how to take care of one’s health in the promotive, i.e. truly health-promoting way as well. In practice that means to expose oneself to such influencing factors that we need to be able to maintain healthy functions both physically and psychologically. This promotive competence is the practical application side of salutogenic research, which studies good health, as opposed to knowledge of preventive measures, which comes from pathogenic research, which studies how diseases occur.
If you want to read more about this, just send me an email and I will send you more detailed information (and for those who want/need to read original publications of research reports, I can also provide references to various sources).