Future positive

The argument in this book rests on a simple proposition: understanding the reason why people prefer to take a chance on sickness and cure is the key to persuading them when and why they should choose prevention instead. This final chapter summarizes the means of persuasion: investigate rather than presuppose which criteria are used to make health choices; build systems for accounting (inclusive costs and benefits of prevention) and for accountability (liability and responsibility); offer ways to improve health, not merely ways to avoid losing it; evaluate, in order to manage, the perceptions linked to health hazards; exploit the logic of choice to insure against the risk of unlikely disasters, to increase the present value of future threats, to foster cooperation as a basis for prevention, to map out the practical pathways to prevention, and to remedy the under-investment in prevention research. The tools of prevention are the means to a greater end—health as a ‘state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being’.