Prevention vs. Treatment

Halley S. Faust, MD, MPH, MA is a preventive medicine physician, philosopher, health care executive, and venture capitalist, and the President-Elect of the American College of Preventive Medicine. He is Clinical Associate Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico.Paul T. Menzel, PhD has taught philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University(Tacoma, WA) since 1971. He has authored two books on moral questions about health economics and numerous papers on rights to health care and the role of values in shaping choices of health system structure.

• 1. Introduction ; Part I. Evidence, Policy, and History ; 2. What Is Currently Spent on Prevention as Compared to Treatment? ; 3. Prevention vs. Cure: An Economist's Perspective on the Right Balance ; 4. Toward a More Evidence-Based Preventive Medicine: Issues in the Science of Clinical Prevention ; 5. Prevention and the Science and Politics of Evidence ; 6. Historical Perspectives on Structural Barriers to Prevention ; Part II. Philosophical and Legal Analysis ; 7. Our Alleviation Bias: Why Do We Value Alleviating Harm More than Preventing Harm? ; 8. Treatment and Prevention: What Do We Owe Each Other? ; 9. The Variable Value of Life and Fairness to the Already Ill: Two Promising but Tenuous Arguments for Treatment's Priority ; 10. The Slow Transition of U.S. Law Toward a Greater Emphasis on Prevention ; 11. Should the Value of Future Health Benefits Be Time-Discounted? ; Part III. Religious and Cultural Perspectives ; 12. Prevention vs. Treatment: How Do We Allocate Scarce Resources from Jewish Ethical Perspectives? ; 13. Cure vs. Prevention: Catholic Perspectives ; 14. Loving God and the Neighbor: Protestant Insights for Prevention and Treatment ; 15. Apocalypse and Health: Treatment and Prevention in the Seventh-day Adventist Tradition ; 16. Prevention vs. Treatment in Hong Kong: Constrained Utilitarianism with a Chinese Character ; Index

The book is aimed at a multi professional audience, including preventive medicine doctors, academics in ethics, religion and philosophy and decision makers in health care spending... The book flows logically and has interesting, thought-provoking examples that pose moral arguments followed by interesting analysis... It fulfils the stated hope of the editors, which is to emphasize that the balance between prevention and treatment is seen as a moral and economic issue as well as a health-related one.