Health promotion, disease prevention, and health maintenance are related terms that all pertain to public health. The World Health Organization (WHO, 2011) defines health promotion as "the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions." Promoting health involves marketing and publicizing information that can help individual consumers, communities, and organizations make decisions that reflect scientifically proven methods of creating health. For example, if scientists discover that smoking causes cancer, a public health organization can create public service announcements related to that finding. The public service announcements might include television advertisements as well as advertisements in newspapers and magazines. In addition to using marketing channels, a public health promotion program can include changing public policy to reflect public health and evidence-based practice. For instance, the banning of smoking in...
[ View Full Essay]