Principles of disease prevention from discovery to application.

This paper reviews the well-known evidence that many of our diseases today relate to lifestyle practices that have their beginning in childhood. While mechanistic understanding of a disease is of obvious value, the history of medicine has shown that preventive measures can be applied long before the pathogenesis of a disease is understood. The greatest obstacle to preventive medicine for the average person is the illusion of immortality and that each of us does not readily make a sacrifice of something pleasurable for a potential benefit in the future, and that for health professionals preventive medicine is not as economically rewarding as therapeutic practice. Hospitals, physicians, parents, and schools can all contribute to enhancing healthy lifestyle practices. We place here particular emphasis on early comprehensive school health education and strongly suggest that such educational efforts must be on par with the teaching of other subjects since good healthy habits strongly affect both children's physical and mental development and thus contribute to a more productive future society.