Historical perspectives on prevention paradox: When the population moves as a whole.

Abstract

Rose's <i>Strategy of Preventive Medicine</i> is critical reading for students and teachers in public health as well as practitioners of family and preventive medicine. In his classic, Geoffrey Rose outlines the prevention paradox that led to a discussion of two main preventive approaches to a disease, the individual- and population-based. This commentary briefly provides historical perspectives and viewpoints on the message of fundamental importance that when the population moves as a whole, the relative differences are the characteristics not of individuals but of populations. The "population as a whole" has been adopted in the lexicon of public health, enriched by Hippocrates' treatise on air, water, and places; Durkheim's collective consciousness; Pickering's continuous unimodal distribution; and Keys' charts of contrasting distributions. These readings should provide the public health professionals with a critical understanding of prevention paradox when they tend to focus only on the expression of the root cause above ground but fail to at the roots beneath the ground.