Is health education good for you?

Traditionally, health education has been conceived as an asset within health care because it provides information and suggests alternatives to individuals, families or groups to prevent disease and promote health. From this perspective, health education seems to be a ‘healthy’ practice, indeed ‘good for you’. This chapter intends to challenge this assumption, providing a critique of health education which employs the concept of bio-power, as developed by Michel Foucault in the first volume of his The History of Sexuality (1990).