A Medical Sociologist Looks at Health Promotion

Let me start by expressing my profound gratitude to the Medical Sociology Section for the Leo G. Reeder Award; it is an exceptional honor, and gives me the opportunity to thank my colleagues and friends who have motivated, supported, and inspired me over the years. Like many of us, I have spent much of my career trying to help health professionals obtain the public's cooperation in extinguishing risky behaviors and undertaking healthy lifestyles. Surrounded by all these attempts at health promotion, it was inevitable that I would develop some notions about it. As that great American philosopher Lawrence Peter Berra (whom some of you may remember as Yogi Berra, former catcher and manager for the New York Yankees) put it, You can observe a lot by watching. So, I'd like to offer a few personal observations about what I've come to feel are some dark sides of the health promotion movement, issues that I think deserve considerable attention from medical sociologists. I would begin with the notion that health promotion has exhorted the public to undertake a large number of different behaviors. I employ the word prematurely because of the considerable disagreement that exists among health professionals concerning the validity and interpretation of the data underlying these recommen-