Have you ever wondered how a mammogram can be a preventive measure when it detects a disease but does not actually prevent it? That's because today the word "prevention" has a broader meaning and is understood not only as preventing disease, but also as slowing down disease that has already occurred. In order to make sense of all this, we divide prevention into several groups.
Primary prevention
What is it? Primary prevention occurs when certain risk factors for disease already exist - we now try to avoid them.
Example: healthy lifestyle, getting enough exercise, avoiding smoking, alcohol.
Secondary prevention
What is it? It seeks to catch the disease early and treat it from the very beginning.
Example: this includes screening tests such as mammography, colorectal colonoscopy, etc. and also seemingly ordinary regular medical check-ups.
Tertiary prevention
What is it? It is about monitoring a patient who has already been cured and preventing the disease from returning. Some experts also include in tertiary prevention the treatment of ongoing disease or the prevention of its worsening.
Example: basically what we think of as treatment - surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy...
Quaternary prevention
What is it? Quaternary prevention means that doctors try not to over-examine or over-treat a patient, so as not to unnecessarily compromise their safety, as it is possible that over-treatment will worsen the patient's condition.
Example: if we need to send a patient for an X-ray, we schedule the scan to find out everything we need to know so that we don't have to send the patient again and burden them with more radiation.
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