Health Promotion - The Family Physician's Responsibility

All health professionals are presently spending the majority of their service time helping families inflicted with chronic, incurable illness. We must begin to place our emphasis on prevention. We have recently begun to look at the problem of early detection of illness but there has been a conspicuous lack of labor in the area of primary prevention or health promotion. This seems to be due not to a lack of knowledge or resources but to the lack of a delineation of responsibility. This article places that responsibility primarily with the family physician.