How Do You Sell What Never Happens? The Invisible Power of Preventative Health
How do you convince people to care more about something they might avoid?
This article will explore:
The challenges of communicating prevention over cure
Cautionary tales from climate change to COVID-19
Lessons learned from successful prevention campaigns
Please add your ideas, comment, and share.
There’s a quiet revolution underway in healthcare. If it works as intended, it will save billions of lives, trillions in costs, and drastically increase healthspan - the number of years spent in good health. Yet, unlike the latest medical breakthrough, it rarely makes the front page.
The revolution is preventative health.
From new understanding of the mechanisms driving complex chronic disease to enable early genetic risk screening, accurate disease prediction, precise diagnostics and digital health monitoring, to the discovery of actively protective biology that could prevent high-risk diseases with new prophylactic drugs and vaccinations, the tools are more sophisticated than ever.
The challenge? Their success is invisible: the heart attack that never happens, the diagnosis that never comes, the hospital stay avoided. That invisibility makes trying to sell prevention and create action in those who would benefit a critical issue that needs to be resolved.
The (marketing) problem with prevention
Selling preventative health is like selling fire alarms to people who have never seen a fire. It works quietly until it doesn’t.
“You’re asking people to invest in something intangible,” notes Dr Lisa Cooper of Johns Hopkins. “They must believe your risk prediction, trust the intervention, and defer satisfaction now for something that may never happen.”
Present bias, preferring dessert over salad even when future health is at stake, is powerful.
That explains why, even though preventative measures like lifestyle changes could prevent around 40% of premature UK deaths, spending on prevention remains below 5% of the UK NHS budget.
Cures command attention: surgeons saving lives, miracle drugs in development. Prevention? Not so much.
As Dr Harvey Fineberg said in his paper The paradox of disease prevention: “When prevention works, nothing happens." And when nothing happens, there is no gratitude, no headlines, no funding.
Climate change as a cautionary tale
The climate crisis is a real-world analogue to the prevention paradox described. For decades, scientists have warned of global warming, rising CO₂, and melting ice.
Despite that, key targets keep slipping. The UN Environment Programme warns we must cut emissions by 42% by 2030 to stay within 1.5°C of warming, and we are not even close. A recent study revealed that a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may now be likely within decades, even under low-emission scenarios.
Part of the challenge has been communication. Scientists and policymakers have struggled to convey the scale, urgency, and immediacy of the threat in ways that cut through to the public. But the greater challenge has been driving action from the main protagonists: the states and corporations responsible for the majority of emissions, who also hold the greatest power to prevent the crisis.
Despite decades of warnings, vested interests, short-term incentives, and political hesitation have delayed meaningful action, leaving the world to bear the consequences of prevention ignored.
We knew about the danger, had the tools to act, but didn’t. Prevention worked quietly, so we ignored it.
The diagnostic paradox
Preventative diagnostics, especially in complex chronic diseases, can provoke anxiety before they provide reassurance. Mechanism-based diagnostics now make it possible to pinpoint the biological pathways that drive conditions such as endometriosis, COPD, Alzheimer’s, ALS, or Long COVID. This allows much more accurate risk prediction and earlier diagnosis than traditional metabolomic diagnostics, symptom-based approaches, or polygenic risk scoring.
But while a predictive test might reveal that you are at higher risk for Alzheimer’s or cardiovascular disease and point to specific interventions that can reduce that risk, it also forces you to confront uncomfortable truths about your health future.
Dr Ananya Banerjee, a behavioural scientist at McGill University, describes this as “the emotional toll of knowing.” For some, this knowledge is empowering. For others, it feels overwhelming.
That is why framing matters.
The real value of mechanism-based diagnostics is not in only telling you what is wrong but in equipping you with agency to act.
Prevention is most persuasive when positioned as a way to take control of your trajectory not a reminder of your vulnerability. Being able to seek the specific treatment and medical specialism that will be most effective in improving your health, by knowing which specific mechanisms are driving your disease.
When prevention isn't rewarded
Economics do not always help either. The production and sale of fossil fuels is too lucrative for those who make financial gains and profit in the short term while the planet suffers in the longer term.
Disease prevention faces the same misalignment as the climate crisis. The health economics argument in favour of prevention over cure is undeniable. However, fee-for-service healthcare models remunerate treatment, not avoidance. Drug developers currently profit more from disease than from preventing it. Even insurers might not benefit, since patients change plans and long-term savings accrue to someone else.
The more effective you are at predicting and preventing, the smaller the market for treatment drugs becomes.
Some progress comes from value-based care models, where providers are rewarded for keeping patients healthier for longer, but shifting incentives is slow.
Post-pandemic backsliding
COVID-19 was the greatest global health crisis in a century. More than 7 million people have died worldwide, with excess deaths estimated far higher. The economic shock was equally staggering: trillions wiped from global GDP, health systems overwhelmed, education disrupted, and long-term impacts still unfolding in the form of Long COVID and workforce displacement.
It was a painful demonstration of what happens when prevention fails. Warnings about pandemic risk had been clear for decades, yet systems were underfunded, stockpiles inadequate, and preparedness plans often theoretical.
And yet, only a few years later, we are already dismantling the very safeguards that might prevent the next pandemic when it happens.
In the U.S., the Trump administration pulled $11 billion in federal funding from state and local health agencies. This triggered layoffs, gutted programs, and experts warned it “dramatically erodes pandemic preparedness.”
The C.D.C. faced wholesale staff layoffs. Key programs such as epidemiology, immunisation, and outbreak analytics were dismantled or severely reduced. Overall, the budget would cut the C.D.C.'s funding by about $5 billion.
Global health security funding is also being slashed. The U.S. administration proposed cutting more than $500 million from global health security programs, and dissolved USAID, disrupting pandemic resilience internationally.
In the U.K., chronic underfunding and a decade of austerity following the 2008 global financial crisis left the public health system depleted when COVID hit. Though the 2024 autumn budget pledged £460 million to strengthen preparedness, those investments arrive late and reactive, not preventative.
How can these reductions be possible straight after we have witnessed how devastating a pandemic can be? How quick are we to forget?
As with the climate crisis, the prevention of major issues tomorrow is being deprioritised in favour of smaller, more immediate fixes today.
Lessons from successful prevention campaigns
If prevention is such a tough sell, what can we learn from the cases where it has worked?
Public health does have some victories, and they suggest an important truth: it is not that people cannot be persuaded to act preventively, it is that the way the message is framed matters enormously.
When campaigns have succeeded, it is rarely because the raw data was compelling enough on its own. It is because the story, the framing, and the cultural context made prevention feel urgent, relevant, and actionable.
Anti-smoking efforts, for example, did not win hearts and minds by showing risk tables in journals. They cut through by showing the human consequences in shocking, visceral ways.
Sunscreen brands do not sell based on twenty-year melanoma projections; they sell based on vanity and immediate benefits you can see in the mirror.
The lesson here is that we are not irrational, but we are human. We respond to what feels close, personal, and emotionally resonant.
Successful prevention campaigns have consistently:
Made the invisible visible: anti-smoking ads linked grisly lung images with real stories.
Reframed benefits: sunscreen says “look younger now,” not “avoid melanoma later.”
Made it easy: HPV vaccination succeeded when integrated into school programs.
Appealed to identity: COVID-19 campaigns that said “protect others” outperformed self-focused messaging.
Linked to aspiration: fitness devices sell "be healthier today," not "avoid heart disease tomorrow."
**Please share other successful prevention campaign examples that come to mind.**
The question for us now is how to take these lessons and apply them to more complex and less visible threats, from chronic disease to global warming and pandemic prevention.
Rethinking how we talk about prevention
If the old playbook of fear and risk awareness is not enough, we need a new vocabulary for prevention. The current framing often positions prevention as something that takes away pleasure today in exchange for uncertain benefits tomorrow. That is hardly an inspiring narrative.
Past examples suggest a more effective approach would be to flip the script: prevention is not about restriction, it is about expansion. It is about unlocking years of vitality, increasing healthspan and longevity, protecting the experiences and relationships people want to preserve, and enabling better choices that align with our goals. It should feel like an investment in a better life, not a tax on the present.
This is where advances in science can be powerful storytellers. Mechanism-based diagnostics and disease risk prediction give us the ability to explain risk in ways that are tangible and personal.
Instead of a generic warning that “heart disease is the number one killer,” you can show someone how their specific biology increases risk, and what specific action can change the trajectory.
When paired with precision medicine approaches in this way, prevention is not just more accurate, but more relatable.
The language we use makes a big difference here:
Say “protect decades of healthy living” instead of “screen to catch disease early.”
Say “increase odds of staying well longer” instead of “reduce your risk.”
Personalise risk. "You have 40% higher risk than average" is more motivating than abstract stats.
Make it actionable. Using mechanistic insights, describe the physiological and molecular processes causing a patient’s illness and its resulting symptoms so that intervention can be targeted and effective.
Prevention has to feel empowering rather than punitive. It should create a sense of agency and optimism, not dread. That means every touchpoint, from diagnostics to public health messaging, has to be designed not just for accuracy, but for human psychology.
If we want preventative health to become mainstream, we need to stop selling it as an insurance policy against fear and start selling it as a passport to a healthier life, lived longer.
The role of trust
None of this works without trust. People must believe the science, the source, and the motive.
Mechanism-based insights can help here. By showing people the biological reasoning behind their risk rather than a black-box prediction, prevention becomes more credible and less abstract. Trust in science is not always a given - we live in a time when more people than ever appear to be sceptical of truth and accepting of misinformation. But trust will grow when explanations feel transparent, personalised, and evidence-based.
Equity matters too. If prevention feels like a privilege only for the wealthy or for certain demographics, distrust will deepen.
Prevention as a movement
It feels like we need cultural change. It starts in schools, becomes a norm in health conversations and healthcare institutions, and becomes the default path. Incentives, social and financial, must all align with prevention.
Mechanism-based diagnostics, precision medicine drug development, actively protective biology, and preventative health initiatives could anchor this movement. They allow us to move beyond vague advice toward precise, personalised prevention - creating opportunities not only to delay disease but to avoid it entirely.
And that is a story worth telling.
Prevention’s success is silent. The headlines will not feature empty hospital beds or avoided diagnoses. Still, in lives saved, healthspan extended, suffering spared, and resources conserved, the difference is seismic.
Signal over noise
