ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how and why health promotion is charged with values and contest. It presents some of the implications of the state of affairs for those involved in planning health promotion curricula in medical education. In a social and political world that is consistently shifting and subject to alteration, subscribing to a particular ideological position provides us with a degree of certainty. The potential partisanship that plays out in healthcare as a result of differing health-related values and ideologies is especially prominent in health promotion. The evidence supplied to support the legislation that provided for the ban was evidence that, generally speaking, had been constructed and disseminated by experts via the House of Commons Health Committee Report. The beginnings of health promotion can be aligned with mid-twentieth-century moves away from accepted and imposed authority, towards individual rights. The importance of the 'hidden curriculum' is not confined to medical education alone, but can also be traced within other professions.
