What is the difference between Disease Treatment and Disease Prevention?

Answer 1

While prevention addresses a specific risk and known cause of a disease, health promotion strives to support the ressources of people which help them not to get sick. Health promotion has a lot to do with supporting the autonomy of individuals. Prevention is related to the pathogentic approach to look at diseases. Health promotion on the other side is connected to so called salutogenesis. But both have the same aim: to avoid sickness and to stay healthy.

Answer 2

Treatment is for a disease someone already has. Prevention is avoiding it in the first place. It's easier and much cheaper to prevent/avoid disease than to treat it.

So if you have a cold, you treat it by drinking plenty of fluids, taking acetomenophen if you have pain or fever, and reduce congestion by breathing humid air or using a saline nose spray.

You prevent a cold by avoiding people who are sick. You keep yourself in good health and state of rest so your body's defenses can destroy viruses before they can multiply. Wash your hands before touching food or your face.

For things like Swine Flu, cholera or other very dangerous diseases, governments help with prevention and treatment.They get tv and newspapers to keep the story in front of you, and to provide facts, not just scare stories (like some shows do). They set up guidelines and quarantine infectious people to protect the healthy. Governments also clean up contaminationto prevent the spread of disease. For example, many governments control mosquitos to prevent bite-transmitted diseases.

In Haiti now, late 2010, cholera is infecting thousands of people a week. The government is preventing disease by ensuring a pure water supply and that people who are sick are separated from groups of healthy. When someone gets cholera, they get diarrhea, which passes the disease. So they have to teach the population to not wash in water supplies and to safely dispose of contaminated clothing, etc. The health workers treat sick people mostly with water! Cholera makes people go so much that they can dehydrate and die. The loss of fluid also drains salts and nutrients, so the patient is given water with some sugar and salt in it -- like Gatorade, or Pedialite.

Disease also includes things like lung cancer(think smoking), diabetes (body can no longer handle all the sugar someone eats), Cadmium poisoning (some toys and jewelry imports) and heart attacks (arteries clogged by cholesterol from eating too much saturated fats).

So: It's easier to prevent disease, and cheaper too, than to treat it. Feels better, too.