The three levels preventive – Primary, Secondary, Tertiary prevention
Prevention comprises of three levels, namely primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. Primary prevention is the act of attempting to avert oneself from contracting a disease. Secondary prevention deals with trying to discover an illness early enough and stop it from worsening. Tertiary prevention is the attempt to enhance one’s lifestyle to lessen the symptoms of a sickness one is suffering. Dekker and Sibai(2001) state that the prevention outlook is based on the idea that the expression, intensity, or increased effect of specific disease prevention.
Under primary prevention, aims are made to prevent sickness way before it happens. Primary prevention prevents people from the causing factors of a disease, e.g., letting go of unhealthy lifestyle habits that may result in sickness and escalating resistance to the illness or harm that may occur if a person is exposed. Examples include stopping the use of harmful products, e.g., generic skin products, and advocating for organic skincare mixtures, creating awareness and pushing for healthy behaviors, e.g., healthy eating, regular exercise, and drug abstinence. Another example of primary prevention is immunization against highly infectious sicknesses.
Secondary prevention is the act of lessening the effect of sickness or infection already occurred. Secondary prevention is the act of mitigating the impact of illness already happened. Secondary prevention is identifying and treating disease immediately. It has occurred to stop it from worsening and calling for personal measures to prevent the infection or illness from reoccurring and also putting in place programs to help people regain their former healthy state to avert long term effects. Examples of secondary prevention measures include proper checkups and testing to spot infection during its early stages, such as detecting breast cancer and incorporating diet and work out programs to stop more illnesses such as heart attacks from occurring. Karunathilake et al. (2018) state that the most crucial act here is early testing to assist patients.
Tertiary prevention aims at enhancing life quality to reduce symptoms of a disease that one may be suffering. Ali and Katz (2015) describe how poor life quality choices are responsible for many deaths in the USA. A 2010 analysis states the leading cause of death was tobacco use resulting in 18.1% total deaths. An unhealthy diet and lack of exercise resulted in 400,000 deaths. Tertiary prevention assists people in taking control of complex health issues such as chronic sicknesses to avoid long-lasting effects. Patients may be advised to revamp their life standards to improve life probability. Examples of tertiary preventive measures include persistent illness management programs of illnesses and incorporating reinforcement teams to permit people to share ideas about improving living standards.
References
Ali, A., & Katz, D. L. (2015). Disease prevention and health promotion: how integrative medicine fits—American journal of preventive medicine, 49(5), S230-S240.
Dekker, G., & Sibai, B. (2001). Primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of pre-eclampsia. The Lancet, 357(9251), 209-215.
Karunathilake, S. P., & Ganegoda, G. U. (2018). Secondary prevention of cardiovascular diseases and the application of technology for early diagnosis. BioMed research international, 2018