Public Health Research

Public health research may well be the most important form of medical research that has ever been done. While things like finding a cure for cancer tend to get more attention far more people have benefited from the results of public health research over the years. The massive increase in life expectancy over the last century has been primarily the result of the research done by public health professionals.

Public health is different from most other kinds of medicine in that the primary purpose is to prevent disease rather than trying to cure it. It also differs in the sense that the focus is primarily on the population at large rather than on the individual patient. Public health research focuses primarily on how diseases are spread and how they can be prevented. There are a wide variety of disciplines within the field of public health but they all focus their research on preventing disease from spreading through the population at large.

In the early days public health research focused primarily on preventing the spread of infectious diseases. Epidemics affected the population at an alarming rate so there was a lot of effort put into determining how infectious diseases spread and what could be done to stop the spread. This was accomplished through things like vaccinations and even the simple act of having people wash their hands. As the ability of the public health practitioners to prevent the spread of infectious diseases the focus of research started to shift, although there is still quite a bit of effort put into limiting the spread of disease.

With the spread of infectious diseases under control, at least in the developed world public health research started to focus more and more on chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease. This change in focus has resulted in a great deal more focus on the causes of diseases rather than just on how they spread. Public health research has moved into other areas as well like occupational safety and accident prevention. Things like seat belt laws are the result of public health research that showed that people are far less likely to be injured in an accident if they wear a seat belt.

Public health research is different from almost all other forms of medical research because it is done primarily by researchers who aren't doctors and it is not normally done in a laboratory. Public health research is largely the study of statistics to determine who is most likely to be affected by disease and to come up with plans to prevent this from happening. There has been something of a split between public health medicine and the rest of the field of medicine because of this and not everybody thinks this is the best way to do public health research. That being said it is hard to argue with the results of the public health practitioners given the enormous increase in life expectancy.