International Journal of Epidemiology 2001;30:1498
© International Epidemiological Association 2001
Letter to the Editor |
What's the good word—preventive or preventative?
Department of Community Health, St. John's Medical College, Bangalore 560034, INDIA
Sirs—While perusing the list of members of the International Epidemiological Association Council, I was surprised to find that one of your members (Dr Babu L Verma) as belonging to the Department of Social and Preventative Medicine of the MLB Medical College in India.
My knowledge of English (obviously limited) convinced me that the word preventative did not exist in the language. I was further influenced by the fact that in India most departments dealing with the subject are referred to as the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine. In addition the most commonly used textbook on the subject in India, over the past thirty years, is referred to as a ‘Textbook of Preventive and Social Medicine’.
This lead me to a dictionary that informed me that preventative is an irregularly formed doublet meaning ‘one of two words from the same language derived from the same original’.
In this day and age of computers, internet and online searches of medical literature this etymological issue has certain implications. For instance, I searched Medline for topics related to the subject using the key words ‘preventive medicine’ and found 20 545 articles related to the topic, while the words ‘preventative medicine’ elicited 101 articles on the topic. A search on PubMed revealed similar results—18 122 for ‘preventive medicine’ and 90 for ‘preventative medicine’. The obvious point is that those who are accustomed to using the word preventative should bear in mind that the use of the common word preventive would yield significantly more results on an electronic search of medical literature. It seems though that in the opposite case researchers would not lose more than 0.5% of the material.
Further, journals should be encouraged to use the more common term in order to facilitate a process of optimum benefit to users of electronic literature searches.
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