Prevention

Prevention means protection: Most diseases are not congenital, but are acquired during a person's lifetime. Everyone has the opportunity to actively prevent potential diseases, primarily through regular exercise, the right diet and adequate rest and relaxation. However, in addition to individual behaviour, a contribution can be made towards reducing the risk of illness by making changes to living environment, for example through health provisions in urban districts or in companies. A distinction is made between primary, secondary and tertiary prevention.

• Primary prevention refers to the general prevention of triggering or existing partial causes (risk factors) of certain diseases or health problems or their individual detection and preventative influencing (Behavioural prevention and conditional prevention). Primary prevention begins before the occurrence of identifiable biological damage.
• Secondary prevention refers firstly to the discovery of an as yet symptom-free early stage of a disease and primarily to its successful early treatment, e.g. as 'disease early recognition' in health insurance. Central to this is the requirement for definite additional use of early treatment as opposed to standard treatment administered subsequently, as otherwise early detection causes unnecessary cost, unnecessary pressure and unnecessary risk. Secondary prevention has recently come to mean the prevention of the reoccurrence of a disease following an initial illness. Secondary prevention in this sense should therefore always be part of modern preventative treatment programmes.
• Tertiary prevention is often understood as the treatment of symptomatic disease with the aim of preventing it from getting worse. This results in crossovers with cure. Narrower concepts of tertiary prevention consequently only describe action aimed at preventing lingering, in particular social, losses of function as tertiary prevention. According to this interpretation tertiary prevention is an important part of rehabilitation and always has a preventative character, see also "Rehabilitation prior to the need for care" ([Walter et al. 2001]).

Refer:

Behavioural prevention and conditional prevention