FGiven the human tragedies and enormous costs caused by the seemingly unstoppable increase in the prevalence of cancer and other chronic diseases, our healthcare system has clearly reached its limits, both in terms of its effectiveness and its financing. It seems time to give prevention the central place in our health system that common sense has always wanted it to have.

From the realm of good intentions and political speeches, prevention must now take the place that should always be its own: that of the pillar of our health policy. We no longer have the resources to do it any other way! The government has made preventative health a national priority; Parliament and health institutions have made this issue the focus of their work and reform projects.

However, despite significant advances in diagnostic tools and digital technologies, and because they combine such heterogeneous factors as education, nutrition, hygiene, lifestyle, environment or even geographical location, the organization and implementation of preventative health is still far more complicated than a health system.

A normative system does not have a preventive approach

The task is therefore difficult. It even seems insurmountable given the deteriorating medical population and the difficulties in meeting the demand for medical care in many areas. Our idea of ​​progress since the Enlightenment has favored an overly mechanistic view of man, which has pushed the patient out of clinical practice and replaced him with the study of his organs, then his cells, and now his genetics.

The resulting modern organization of medicine is based on both statistics (evidence-based medicine) and the medical procedure. The latter is codified in protocols of scientific societies and then in nomenclatures established by health insurance. This standardized approach “manages” the disease based on an interpretation of symptoms, isolating them from the context in which they occur and ignoring the uniqueness of each individual. We no longer treat the man, but the disease.

This normative system is of course completely incompatible with a preventive approach, which requires looking at people as a whole, their uniqueness and their environment in order to identify and respond preventively to the risk factors that contribute to the occurrence of diseases or accidents. To be effective, medicine can no longer be limited to simple, one-off curative measures divorced from the complex reality of the patient. And this is mainly because healthcare professionals want to be the first to find time to do a job better, which most of them have chosen by vocation.

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