A Final Reflection "The greatest medicine of all is to teach people how not to need it”- Hippocrates

As we end the course, I would like to use this opportunity to reflect on my learning journey in MHST 631 – Health Promotion 1. Despite participating in the healthcare industry for over a decade, this was my first encounter learning about health promotion in a formal academic setting. This further reaffirms one of my greatest learning discoveries in this course, which is related to the gap between acute and chronic care medicine and the field of health promotion. Through the various units on the history and evolution of health promotion, theories, frameworks, and models of health promotion, and the process of health promotion priority setting and program planning, I developed an appreciation for the distinction of healthcare that we know in the conventional sense of healthcare delivery and disease treatment and the field of health promotion. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of health promotion best describes this distinction and explains why I have been so far removed from it despite being a healthcare provider for so long:

“Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health. It moves beyond focusing on individual behaviour towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions” (WHO, 2023).

The assignments and weekly forum discussions provided an excellent opportunity to engage with core concepts of health promotion, such as the Ottawa Charter and its action areas, the importance of socio-ecological theory, and international initiatives, such as the Sustainable Development Goals. Furthermore, learning about these concepts has prompted me to appreciate the need and urgency for more health promotion interventions nationally and globally to curb the impact of the ongoing socio-ecological threats, such as air pollution, income disparities, gaps in education, and many more that are constantly distancing us from achieving the goal of health promotion.

As the course ends, I know this is just the beginning for me to continue learning about and finding opportunities to contribute to health promotion. After all, “the greatest medicine of all is to teach people how not to need it” (Hippocrates, n.d.).

References

Hippocrates. (n.d.). The greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it. Retrieved December 3, 2023, from https://quotefancy.com/quote/829226/Hippocrates-The-greatest-medicine-of-all-is-teaching-people-how-not-to-need-it

World Health Organization (WHO). (2018, January 24). Health Promotion. Retrieved December 3, 2023, from https://www.who.int/westernpacific/about/how-we-work/programmes/health-promotion#:~:text=Health%20promotion%20is%20the%20process,of%20social%20and%20environmental%20interventions.