[Promoting health instead of health education]

The idea of health education--meaning experts telling laymen how to setup a healthy behaviour by applying educational tricks--is an illusion. Humans don't act as they should by following the ideas of public health scientists, not even after an intensive educational training. They aren't trivial machines. Their way of acting ist not predeterminable. A change of strategy from health promotion to changing the attitude to health promotion to random circumstances of living has been of limited success. Changing these circumstances (top down) improves only a part of health influencing factors. It is impossible to exclude that by changing these factors others are made worse. But by ethic standards we are titled to check decisions relating to living conditions in respect of their health relevance. Therefore, health promotion meaning the promotion of more self-determination of one's own health is inevitable if a sustainable success is wanted. The request for a short-time measure of success is understandable from an economic point of view but it is not adequate. In the long run this would lead to trivilaesation++ of matters that are not trivial.