Please, don’t throw tomatoes yet! Everybody knows that prevention in the twentieth century, particularly due to use of infectious disease vaccines and more recently some innovative invasive procedures, has changed the demographic face of our population and the world’s.

Of course, while what “everybody” knows is never the whole of the matter, the inspiring story of diagnosis, followed by treatment, followed by survival is a wonderful sequence of events.

An upcoming symposium is about the flip-side of that coin (although it has been very hard to get people to talk about it). About eighteen months ago, we chose to bring together scholars who don’t necessarily presume that the mainstream health care perspective of diagnosis and follow-up treatment is more than a single widely endorsed perspective. The upcoming symposium, part of the annual series on health/disability/elder law held by Marquette’s Elder’s Advisor law review, proposes that prevention is often enough overrated that close examination is warranted. The symposium is titled “The Institutionalization of Prevention: We Win, We Lose.”

Cancer diagnosis and treatment is particularly, but hardly exclusively, illustrative.