What's that all about? The term "cure" means that, after medical treatment, the patient no longer has that particular condition anymore. Some diseases can be cured. Others, like hepatitis B , have no cure. Some diseases can be cured. Others, like hepatitis B , have no cure.
The person will always have the condition, but medical treatments can help to manage the disease. Medical professionals use medicine, therapy, surgery, and other treatments to help lessen the symptoms and effects of a disease.
Sometimes these treatments are cures — in other words, they get rid of the disease. Doctors treat people with diabetes using insulin injections and other methods so they can continue to live normal lives.
This branch of medicine includes:. But many preventive medicine physicians do both, working in both the clinical and non-clinical branches of the field. Preventive medicine is an important field of medicine. It not only keeps patients and communities healthy, but it also helps keeps health costs down.
All doctors incorporate some degree of preventive medicine into their practice. But primary care physicians are especially good at helping their patients stay healthy.
We are pleased to announce that the Breast cancer risk reduction starts with healthy habits like moving your body every day and lowering your stress. Making changes in your lifestyle The University of Tennessee Medical Center provides medical treatment without regard to race, age, color, national origin, ethnicity, culture, language, socioeconomic status, religion, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation or disability.
Copyright University of Tennessee Medical Center. Perhaps participants in the prevention condition reasoned that the evidence for the proposed preventive intervention of a quitting smoking course was stronger than for anti-smoking PSAs, which is in fact just another preventive activity. In contrast, participants in the treatment condition, who were not told about the effective smoking prevention course, may have reasoned that at least some money should go to smoking prevention, especially given the fact that the expenses of the proposed lung cancer operation are high.
The mediation analyses suggested that only the urgency to introduce the proposed method plays a role in explaining differences in appreciation between prevention and treatment. This is in accordance with earlier research showing a preference for helping more severely ill patients[ 25 ].
Quite logically, the need to intervene is perceived as greater when someone is already ill than when someone is merely at risk for a disease. The other explanatory variables for either a preference for treatment i.
As expected, the preference for treatment disappeared when participants were asked to directly compare prevention to treatment interventions. This suggests that when people have to choose between a preventive and a treatment intervention, they prefer prevention more when they just were presented with the costs and complexities of a treatment intervention. Clearly, as previous research has demonstrated, most people, when allowed to compare, maintain that prevention is better than treatment but when they are merely presented with one or the other, which is often the case in real-life situations, treatment is preferred.
Given that preference for prevention is greatest when presented alongside a treatment intervention, we contend that preference for prevention can be stimulated by providing information about the costs and complexities of treatment interventions and outlining that these cost and complexities of treatment can be prevented.
Although the findings of this study support the idea that treatment is preferred to prevention in a between-subjects design, caution should be applied when generalizing these results. Many preventive methods exist and this study only presented a quitting smoking course, which is an intervention rooted in behavioral science.
Because the treatment an operation was an intervention rooted in medical science, differences in appreciation might also be attributed to a different appreciation of these sciences. So it is possible that, had our prevention scenario described a preventive intervention rooted in medical rather than behavioral science e.
As a result, our second study replicates the first, but rather than proposing a quitting smoking course as the prevention intervention, it proposes prevention through an anti-smoking pill. Background characteristics of participants are presented in Table 1. The procedure, scenarios, questionnaires, and data analyses were identical to those of Study 1 with two exceptions. First, the questionnaires were not completed by train passengers but rather online by participants derived from a database of people who had previously volunteered to participate in questionnaire studies.
We therefore analyzed the items separately, as we did in Study 1. A MANOVA was executed with scenario condition as the independent variable and the appreciation measures as dependent variables see Table 4. Similar to Study 1, we conducted mediation analyses in accordance with Baron and Kenny[ 24 ].
In short, participants were more convinced that the treatment intervention is urgent, certain, and has positive effects in the short term. Significant results were found for urgency to introduce the method and certainty that mortality will decrease on general appreciation.
On all three appreciation measures, the influence of scenario condition reduced. In short, the mediation analyses showed that the effect of scenario condition on three appreciation scales is partly mediated by the urgency to introduce the method and that the effect of scenario condition on general appreciation is also mediated by the certainty that less people will die of lung cancer because of the intervention.
As was the case in Study 1, a univariate analysis was executed with the scenario condition as the independent variable and the realism of scenarios as the dependent variable. However, given the p-value, we conducted a MANCOVA with scenario condition as an independent variable, perceived realism of the scenario as a covariate, and general appreciation, the amount of money participants would donate, percentage that health insurance should compensate, and the three questions on how health insurance should invest funds as dependent variables.
The results of the two studies presented in this paper challenge the old adage 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The main hypothesis was thus confirmed. On the whole, more general and monetary appreciation was shown for a treatment intervention than for a preventive intervention that was analogous in terms of the disease in question, the information on the most important risk factor smoking , and the costs per saved life.
In the first study, the scientific domain of the interventions may have differed with the quitting smoking course being perceived as a behavioral intervention and the operation being seen as a medical intervention.
Differences in appreciation for these two fields of science could have led to the differences in appreciation for the proposed preventive and treatment interventions. However, in our second study, both interventions were medical interventions and still the treatment condition was preferred to prevention.
We thus conclude that this significantly stronger appreciation for treatment is quite robust. At the same time, we strongly suggest replicating this study with other diseases and with other study populations. It also appears that the preference for treatment is limited to situations in which one cannot or chooses not to compare preventive and treatment interventions. In both studies, when participants compared the intervention they initially read about in the scenario with a short description of the other intervention, thus when they were challenged to consider other use of resources, their preference shifted to prevention.
This is in line with Corso et al. Preference for prevention in these instances appears to be a matter of momentarily paying lip service to prevention. This is not to say that preference for treatment, as found in our study, is a better reflection of reality or that health economic studies should not use comparative study designs. The present study merely shows that there are psychological forces at work that undermine the preference for prevention most people proclaim when challenged to comparatively assess prevention and treatment and this is important to recognize as appreciation for prevention or treatment may have far-reaching consequences for policy-making in general and health budget allocation in particular.
In our studies, we also endeavored to gain insight regarding why people prefer treatment to prevention. Several potential explanations based on a number of proposed psychological mechanisms were tested. We explored whether preference for treatment was related to the fact that treatment has more short term effects, greater certainty with regard to the attribution of positive outcomes, a higher proportion of people who profit, and greater perceived urgency.
Following Hsee et al. Indeed, we found that the urgency of the intervention and particularly the urgency to introduce the proposed intervention operation, quitting smoking course, or anti-smoking pill most consistently explained the preference for treatment over prevention. In fact, urgency mediated the effect of the type of intervention on general appreciation in both the first and the second study in addition to mediating the effect of the type of intervention on two monetary appreciation items in the second study.
The importance of urgency in explaining differential appreciation for prevention and treatment corresponds with the idea that people are more willing to spend resources on identifiable individuals than on people who are just statistics[ 16 ]. These findings are also in line with the Construal-level Theory of Psychological Distance[ 27 ]: the time delay associated with prevention and the hypothetical nature of it two dimensions that according to this theory promote psychological distance may lead to a relatively abstract construal of prevention measures compared to treatment that is relatively concrete , and also to more perceived social distance.
The higher perceived social distance may lead to a low perceived urgency of prevention measures compared to treatment. An interesting line for future research would be to further investigate whether differences in perceived psychological distance indeed lead to differences in appreciation between prevention and treatment. Furthermore, our finding that the certainty that an intervention leads to less mortality mediates the effect of the type of intervention on general appreciation, as found in our second study, supports for the work of Tversky and Kahneman[ 15 ] who claim that people prefer relatively certain positive outcomes to less certain but potentially more positive outcomes.
In exploring what drives preference for treatment to prevention, it is important that we not only look at the variables that predict this preference but also the variables that do not predict the preference for treatment over prevention.
Our findings showed no support for the contention that the time interval required for positive outcomes to manifest and the proportion of the target group that profits impact preferences for treatment over prevention.
This was surprising given that Read and Read[ 13 ] found a preference for positive outcomes in the short term and Jenni and Loewenstein[ 17 ] found that the difference in proportion between statistical and identifiable victims was the main cause for the identifiable victim effect.
However, one possibility is that at least some of the respondents who read the preventive scenario understood the question about the proportion of people treated in vain to mean the proportion people that did not stop smoking instead of the proportion that did not profit from the intervention in terms of dying of lung cancer.
Moreover, in our study, we found that quality of life after the intervention was similar for both the prevention and the treatment conditions.
Could it be that a life without smoking is not considered a more positive outcome than a life after an operation? One could argue that a limitation of both studies is that the variation on the prevention-treatment dimension went hand in hand with variations on other dimensions. For example, although the costs of a saved life were the same in both interventions, the costs of treatment vs.
Therefore, we cannot exclude the possibility that the preference for treatment was not caused by a difference in preference for treatment and prevention per se, but by differences on these dimensions. The relative influence of these factors could be disentangled in follow-up studies. However, we would argue that in real life these differences are inherent to differences between prevention and treatment: prevention and treatment in general have different methods, and because prevention is almost by definition directed at a larger population than treatment, efficacy tends to be lower and so invested money per person should also be lower to lead to equal costs of a saved life.
The results of our study have shown that when asked to compare and so are triggered to consider other use of resources, people prefer prevention but when subjective assessments get a chance, treatment is clearly preferred. In these instances, treatment is appreciated more in general and also in terms of how funds should be allocated.
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