Preventive health behaviors and physician visits: relevance to health inequality

Clear definitions and measurement of preventive health behaviors, as well as the relevant demographic and socioeconomic variables, is important to understanding what factors explain inequalities in health and in the use of health care services. This commentary addresses issues related to the measurement of preventive health behaviors and suggests a distinction between personal life style behaviors and preventive screening practices in order to better explain the associations between these practices and visits to general practitioners. The commentary notes that physician visits are a health-related behavior which is shaped by socioeconomic status: visits to general practitioners are more prevalent among the poor, while visits to specialists are more prevalent among the rich. Therefore, in any analysis of the factors contributing to socioeconomic inequalities in health, physician visits and preventive health behaviors ought to be included as two distinct sets of health-related behaviors. Changing these health-related behaviors is only one of the interventions that are better developed by healthcare services, while the majority of multi-level efforts to reduce inequalities should be outside of the health sector.