Health Promotion Paper

Health education and promotion is vital to address the challenging field of health and health care. A century ago, the average life expectancy in the United States was approximately 50 years of age. Current life expectancy in the United States is nearly 80 years of age. Improvements in the prevention and treatment of infectious disease allowed for a different class of disease to emerge. Chronic diseases, which develop and persist over time, affecting people for long periods of time continue to be on the rise. These changing patterns of disease have influenced the cost of medical care and even the definition of health, making necessary to develop programs targeting chronic disease prevention and maintenance.
In the United States, costs of medical

There is greater emphasis on the early detection of disease and on changes to a healthier lifestyle and to behaviors that help prevent disease. The area of health education and promotion provides opportunities to meet this goal.
Tones and Tilford (2001) suggest that health promotion and education have a symbiotic relationship. Health education provides the agenda setting and aspects of critical education in health promotion. Whereas health education is aimed at informing people to influence their future decision-making, health promotion aims at complementary social and political actions (Green & Kreuter, 2004).
While there is no universally accepted definition of health education the term is traditionally regarded to represent planned opportunities for people to learn about health and to make changes to their behavior (Naidoo & Wills, 2009). Health education provides the agenda setting and critical consciousness raising in health promotion. Health education is aimed at informing people to influence their future individual or collective decision-making, health promotion aims at complementary social and political actions that facilitate political changes in peoples social, workplace, and community environments to enhance health. Health promotion is about

This emphasis, given on the deliberate contrast many of its proponents make to costly medical care, has helped to make health promotion politically legitimate (Laverack, 2004). In broad terms, health promotion describes a relationship between the state (which regulates health opportunities), market economies (which create both health opportunities and health hazards) and community groups (which influence both the state and market economies as well as their own