Kaiser Permanente Institutes of Preventive Medicine.

I am pleased and honored to be Guest Editor of this special issue of The Permanente Journal. In my 36th year of association with Kaiser Permanente (KP), no one is more surprised than I that I have spent the majority of that time in Preventive Medicine, far from Infectious Diseases, where I started. While physicians readily give lip service to Preventive Medicine, it is often considered a dull, somewhat ineffectual field dealing with immunization schedules, cautionary statements , and a handful of unchanging public health problems. These certainly do not attract physicians like the drama of acute care medicine and surgery. Further, the most basic causes of many public health problems are truly complex, difficult to understand, and often inadequately studied when they involve behavioral issues— as they frequently do. New Ideas Fortunately, the general lack of attention to Preventive Medicine provides an opportunity to develop and test new ideas in this field, especially in a large organization like KP. This issue of The Permanente Journal deals with just such new ideas. If we are serious about preventing disease, we ought to think carefully about why people become ill. What is illness? How does illness relate to disease? These are not easy questions, and our teachers and mentors didn't prepare us for them in medical school and residency. In candid moments , many of us admit to being unprepared for much of what walks into the office during our first several years of practice. A Pathway Through this Issue " A General Theory of Love " A logical pathway through this special issue on Preventive Medicine starts with the book review of A General Theory of Love (page 113). It is the lack of love, and our various responses to this lack, that produces much illness and a significant portion of the common chronic diseases. In the Fall issue, the book review of Growing Up Fast illustrated the effects of lack of love in the context of teenage pregnancy and its biomedical, psychological, and social complications. 1 In this issue, Gregorio Saccone, MD's review of Dry (page 112) gives Kaiser Permanente Institutes of Preventive Medicine us insight into the underpinnings of alcoholism—use-ful knowledge if one is serious about understanding its prevention. Crossing the BLVD (page 108) looks into the lives of immigrants—physicians and patients—What do we know of vastly different cultures, torture, exotic diseases? The popularity of Dr Chopra's books …