The term preventive medicine is related to public health. The American Board of Preventive Medicine separates three categories of preventive medicine: aerospace health, occupational health, and public health and general preventative medicine. Jung, Boris and Lushniak argue that preventive medicine should be considered the medical specialty for public health but note that the American College of Preventive Medicine and American Board of Preventive Medicine do not prominently use the term “public health”. Preventive medicine specialists are trained as clinicians and address complex health needs of a population such as by assessing the need for disease prevention programs, using the best methods to implement them, and assessing their effectiveness.
Since the 1990s many scholars in public health have been using the term population health. There are no medical specialties directly related to population health. Valles argues that consideration of health equity is a fundamental part of population health. Scholars such as Coggon and Pielke express concerns about bringing general issues of wealth distribution into population health. Pielke worries about “stealth issue advocacy” in population health. Jung, Boris and Lushniak consider population health to be a concept that is the goal of an activity called public health practiced through the specialty preventive medicine.
Lifestyle medicine uses individual lifestyle modification to prevent or revert disease and can be considered a component of preventive medicine and public health. It is implemented as part of primary care rather than a specialty in its own right. Valles argues that the term social medicine has a narrower and more biomedical focus than the term population health.