Bad medicine: health promotion

Research is flawed and open to the bias of the authors because people don’t invest time and energy to prove themselves wrong. So if research conclusions don’t make intuitive sense, it is prudent to question the validity of the research. So it is with the conclusions of research into health promotion, because I don’t believe that educating (that is, lecturing) patients to change lifestyle works. It is simply not how people operate. Patients
are aware of risks but want only choose to ignore our advice. But governments ignore this: health promotion in England costs £3.7bn (€4.5bn; $5.9bn) a year.1 The coalition government is promoting the slogan “every contact counts.”2 We are to weigh in and nag about diet and smoking in every health contact because “brief interventions” work. Indeed, outreach health missionaries are storming door to door with so called health
promotion propaganda, sticking the foot in whether people want it or not. Mehr