Preventive medicine aims to be able to detect and treat perturbations in healthy individuals long before disease symptoms appear, thus optimizing the wellness of individuals and avoiding disease. P4 (Preventive, Predictive, Personalised and Participatory) represents a move away from models of reacting to illness to prevention and maintaining health.
Preventive medicine consists of measures taken for disease prevention and health promotion, as opposed to just treatment of symptoms and diseases. Just as health encompasses a variety of physical and mental states, so do disease and disability, which are affected by lifestyle, environmental factors, and genetic predisposition. Health, disease, and disability are dynamic processes (‘health continuum’) which begin before symptoms occur and individuals realize they are affected. Disease prevention relies on anticipatory actions that can be categorized as primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention.