Time to ban the word “prevention”

Few phrases are better known than “prevention is better than cure,” and its message seems irrefutable. Prevention is the favoured answer to the accumulating woes of the NHS: if people don’t get sick then the costs of the NHS will stop rising, although nobody asks what will happen to all those hospitals filled with more than a million staff. Despite its universal popularity, I want to ban the word “prevention.” How can I possibly argue that?A few years ago, my friend Pritt, one of life’s instinctive radicals and iconoclasts, talked to me about “the deficit model of health.” At first, I didn’t grasp his point, but slowly I came to understand. What is being prevented? Sickness, of course. Prevention leads to health, which is the “absence of sickness.” Health is defined as a deficit, the absence of sickness. And who determines if you are sick? Doctors. If we stick with…
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