Chapter Summary

This chapter describes:

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  how encouraging a healthy lifestyle should prevent disease and reduce the burden on the health services and acts as a central plank of modern healthcare policy;
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  how choices relevant to health are constrained by structural factors and shaped by cultural interpretations of risk;
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  how health competes with other values so choices need to be understood in the appropriate cultural context;
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  how the treatment of asymptomatic patients who are ‘at risk’ on the basis of biochemical or genetic indicators has implications for what it means to be ill.