Health Education IS Health Prevention

The fact is, a physician and team of healthcare experts can only do so much. In fact, they are more often tasked with treating illness and disease, not necessarily preventing them. No one goes to a physician and says, "Hey Doc, I'm healthy. I just want to know what I can do to make sure I stay healthy."
For that reason, we resort to health education -- teaching the world about illness and disease in hopes that they can be better patients to themselves. Hopefully, we can nearly eradicate certain diseases by teaching people exactly how to prevent them.
Ergo, Health Education IS Health Prevention.
The more we work to educate the world about illness, the more we can prevent illness from happening.
Here is my general concern about the future: it seems that physicians are having less and less time with each individual patient. There is only so much a physician can do in that little time. Most importantly, of course, is to treat and address the chief complaint. Less time = less education = less prevention = more illness. More illness leads to even less time with a patient as there are more patients who now need care. This is a vicious cycle, so what can we do about it?
1. Increase the amount of physicians we graduate each year. Clearly we need more physicians, and we have more and more competitive applicants each year, so why not simply accept more? Ultimately, the government would need to open more residency spots to accommodate the increasing amounts of graduating students, but I believe it a feasible option.
2. Increase our resources for health education. Everyone should be constantly striving to educate the people and communities around us. This can eve be done through the media or internet.
3. Increase the amount of time we spend with each patient. Unfortunately, this is probably the least feasible option. Hospitals are mandating physicians see a certain amount of patients in a given time, so there is very little a physician can do in this aspect. It would have to start from the top down.

At this time, we can only work to increase our health education and hope for more prevention.