Preventive Medicine Research

Preventive medicine is an important but sadly underfunded area of medical research. It would be much better both from a health and a financial standpoint if we could prevent illness rather than trying to cure it after the fact. Unfortunately most of the money in medical research goes to curing disease instead. Changing this would be a huge benefit to our health care system.

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that preventive medicine is largely about preventing illness and injury. Therefore you can probably guess what the research is focused on. The difference between preventive medicine and public health medicine is that preventive medicine tends to focus on the individual while public health focuses on the public at large. From a research perspective that means that less emphasis is placed on how to prevent diseases from spreading and more emphasis is placed on individual health. That being said there is a huge overlap between the two fields and almost all doctors who work in one field receive training in the other.

One of the most important areas of preventive medicine is on how people's lifestyle choices affect their health. It is well known that things like poor diet, lack of exercise and smoking lead to all kinds of health problems. Figuring out what those health problems are and devising ways to prevent them is an important part of this research. Areas like nutrition or exercises are huge fields of study that are usually done by researchers who focus on just those fields. However preventive medicine researchers will often study the health effects of new breakthroughs in nutrition or exercise.

An important area of study for preventive medicine is in occupational medicine. The said fact is that many people get injured, sick or killed at work. There is a huge need to reduce the number of work related health problems. Preventive medicine research pays close attention to identifying the health risks at work and on ways to minimize those risks. Some of them are obvious, like fall protection for people who work at heights. However a lot of the research is in areas where many people are unaware of the risks, like exposure to materials that turn out to be hazardous.

A big part of the process of preventive medicine is identifying risks to people's health. That means that a lot of the research into the field is focused on ways of screening people who might be at risk. This could be focusing on people who are showing unhealthy behaviors, or it could be identifying people who might be particularly prone to a certain illness. The goal is to identify them early enough that future health problems can be avoided. For example if you can catch kids who are likely to start smoking before they actually do you can prevent a lot of health issues. The research that needs to be done is on how to identify these kids.