Public Health Vs Public Health

Public health is defined as organized, systematic efforts aimed at the prevention of disease and the promotion of health at the community level (Mays & Smith, 2011). Throughout history, prevention efforts by the public health sector were directed at controlling transmissible diseases, reducing environmental hazards, and provisions of safe drinking water. Public health professionals historically have worked to prevent problems from happening or from recurring through execution of educational programs, endorsing policies, directing services and conducting research. Public health regards the population and community it deals with as its primary focus; allocating its efforts to preventative medicine, and health promotion and studying the short and long term effects of intervention. Relative time frames for the public health sector are in terms of generations; meaning they desire to change the outcome for the future. Public health focuses on human behavior, lifestyle, environmental factors and medical care. Public health looks at sociology, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, and economics of the population to determine cause and effect. There are three core functions of public health: assessment, policy development, and assurance. Clinical medicine is individual and family focused; dealing with diagnosis and treatment. Clinical medicine is typically not concerned with behavior or lifestyle as much as it is focused on medical care and the cure of the medically recognized disease processes, trauma, or mental health issues. Medicine is is very organized with direct lines of specialization. Medicine deals with relevant time frames in terms of a single person’s lifetime. Medicine focuses on a single individual and occasionally their immediate family. Clinical medicine has been criticized for putting more emphasis on cure than prevention by proponents of public health’s methods. The education of clinical medicine practitioner’s focuses on developing core knowledge in biomedical sciences oriented toward understanding anatomy and physiology, and the effects of pharmacological and surgical intervention. Basically, to some, medicine is not medicine unless you are prescribing pharmacological interventions and cutting people …show more content…
Without medicine to take care of the immediate problem there is a potential for suffering. On the other hand, without public health, diseases could easily gain momentum and overwhelm available treatment resources. The problem is that, in the past, public health and clinical medicine have been two distinct health silos; totally separate of each other. Neither of them recognized that the health of an individual and the health of a community are related and dependent on each other. In order to provide the best care and improve the quality of life of the patients that are served; there is a dire need to bridge the gap and encourage collaboration and cooperation between the two …show more content…
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