IS THERE A PATHOLOGY OF PREVENTION - THE IMPLICATIONS OF VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE IN SCREENING PROGRAMS

The preventive orientation that has been gaining ground in Sweden is i ndicative of ways in which our society is organized to sustain values like ''a healthy life,'' ''a healthy body,'' and ''a healthy society.' ' Search for health dangers and risks shows how medical technology has been integrated with our thinking about health. Preventive language, like all language of medicine, besides describing a pre-existing biolo gical reality, creates in the process its own objects of analysis. Thi s also has an impact and influences how lay people experience their bo dies. The study presented focuses on one form of prevention in an atte mpt to describe how the ambition to secure a healthy society, through the detection of early disease, may have the opposite effect. Medical health-care ambitions in screening for cholesterolaemia will be relate d to implications for a group of men in whom cholesterol was found to be elevated. The men feel healthy yet are in some sense diseased. This raises the issue of visualizing the invisible in health care and the implications of such a process for the patients concerned.