Prevention and a community focus are integral to general practice

I welcome Martin and colleagues’ thought provoking reflections on the role of general practice in delivering primary prevention for asymptomatic people.1 Illich’s concepts of clinical and social iatrogenesis resonate through their powerful arguments—that we are inappropriately preoccupied with delivering medications with negligible benefits to ostensibly healthy people.2 Yet the idea that general practitioners should largely offload prevention to overstretched public health teams …