Health promotion, a general term, refers to a wide range of health-enhancing activities that seek to maintain health and functional ability, increase longevity, and reduce the prevalence and consequences of disease. These diverse activities include distributing free needles to substance abusers, identifying and modifying genes such as those linked to the development of Alzheimer's disease, proposing laws that seek to deter cigarette smoking, and offering blood pressure and cholesterol screening. They also include personal health practices whereby individuals engage in healthy lifestyles, consume vitamins, and the like. Therefore, these wide-ranging activities are conducted by persons trained in the field of public health, traditional health care workers, practitioners of complementary medicine, basic science researchers, politicians, health policy experts, and the individuals who practice health-enhancing behavior, to name but a few.

Long ignored in favor of medical, surgical, and pharmaceutical treatments that...