Behavioral Medicine:

Building health care on individuals’ responsibilities to care for their emotional, mental, medical and environmental health In the past, most serious diseases and disorders were said to be caused by contacts with viruses and bacteria that are out of the control of the “ordinary person.” When it came to preventing, managing, and containing diseases and disorders, individuals were said to have little or no power or responsibilities because the pathogens responsible for the diseases were almost impossible to avoid or controlled by individuals’ efforts. So, humans are unavoidably at the mercy of these pathogens-disease causing organisms.

Today, such mind-set and conception have been unambiguously disproven because new discoveries show that the severity or lethality of any diseases or disorders can be as a result of individuals’ behaviors (what was done) or their failures to behavior accordingly (what was not done). For this reason, a lot of health problems, including epidemics and pandemics can be attributed to lack of personal and collective responsibilities to health care. This is a huge problem in developing countries, where health care knowledge and information are insignificant at best and no existent at worst, resulting in rapid spread of diseases, difficulties containing even minor disease outbreaks,  and public susceptibility to diseases and disorders.