If we take a medical life course perspective, we shall become aware that for each event there shall be a time to prevent it. From a scientific and socio-economic point of view, this is the crucial time to prevent failure of an organ, duration of an illness, death or an otherwise disruptive event. Taking our lung or liver as examples we intuitively know that there is a long time spell during which we have a chance to work on prevention. The monitoring of the early onset of disease is (Ge et al. 2026), potentially, a very cost-saving way as well in addition to avoid humans suffering later on in multiple ways. From a theoretical point of view it will be interesting to “think intervention as prevention” already, rather than the predominant way of intervention “post-hoc”, which means after the onset of disease. This implies a rather complete overhaul of medical research just as much as social research to guide policy makers interested in the “survival” of our social security systems as we know them currently in Europe. (Image is illustration in book on fairy tales: Beckmann in exhibition at Kunstbibliothek Berlin, 2026)
