In this opening chapter, we outline some of the most influential (and
most contested) definitions of health, and approaches to health promotion.
Although some success has been claimed for health promotion interventions,
in general the results to date have been modest: for example, safer
sex campaigns in preventing HIV infection among gay men. In other areas
efforts have been remarkably disappointing, notably in preventing smoking
uptake among adolescents. ‘Health promotion’ is a term which has
been applied to a very wide range of activities performed in many and
diverse contexts. Often there has been little regard for whether the ways
in which professionals would like to improve other people’s health is the
way that those people feel is important for themselves. Perhaps this failure
to match the goals of professionals to the health concerns of ordinary
people accounts for these uneven results. We believe that this mismatch
is significant and it is from this perspective that we have approached
this book.