A bit of history: why Hygieia?

Hygieia, health preserved

In Greek mythology, Hygieia (Ὑγίεια) is the goddess of health — but not just any kind. Daughter (or companion, depending on the version) of Asclepius, the god of medicine, she specifically embodies preserved health: hygiene, balance, prevention. Her sister Panacea, by contrast, represents the universal cure — healing once illness has already struck. The two figures complement each other, but their difference already says it all: Panacea heals, Hygieia prevents the need to heal in the first place. Her name is the root of the word “hygiene,” and it's this precise idea — preserving rather than repairing — that gives Hygietest its name.

A goddess at the heart of ancient medicine

Hygieia wasn't a minor figure. She was honored alongside her father in the sanctuaries of Asclepius, the most famous of which was at Epidaurus, where the sick came from across Greece seeking a cure. Her name appears in the very first line of the original Hippocratic Oath: the future physician swore “by Apollo the healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia and Panacea.” The Romans adopted her under the name Salus, the goddess of safety and good health.

She is most often depicted as a young woman feeding a serpent from a cup. The serpent, which sheds its skin, symbolized renewal; the cup held the remedy. This image has endured through the centuries: the “cup of Hygieia,” wrapped by a serpent, is today the emblem of pharmacists, visible on the green cross of many pharmacies.

Prevention, a long history

The idea that it's better to avoid illness than to treat it is as old as medicine itself. In the 5th century BCE, the Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places already explained that health depends on the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the way you live.

It took a long time for this intuition to become a science. In 1796, English physician Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine. The disease, which had killed millions of people, was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1980: the first human disease ever eliminated through prevention. In 1847, in Vienna, Ignaz Semmelweis showed that simply having doctors wash their hands sharply reduced mortality among women after childbirth. In 1854, in London, John Snow stopped a cholera outbreak by having a contaminated water pump shut down, even before the responsible microbe was known.

The 20th century extended this logic to chronic diseases. In 1948, the Framingham Study began in the United States, following the residents of a small Massachusetts town for decades. It is from this study that the concept of a “risk factor” comes: smoking, high blood pressure, or cholesterol signal a heart attack years in advance, and you can act on them. Every score used on Hygietest is a descendant of this idea.

These examples have one thing in common: in each case, someone observed, counted, compared, and then proposed a simple action. Modern prevention doesn't rest on intuition or folk remedies, but on evidence patiently gathered. This is also what sets it apart from unfounded “wellness” promises: a serious preventive measure is one whose effect has actually been verified.

Why preventive medicine matters so much

This isn't just an appealing idea on paper. According to the latest OECD data, more than 3 million premature deaths could be prevented each year in member countries through better prevention policies. In France, DREES (the French ministry of health's statistics department) estimates that about 143 deaths per 100,000 people could be prevented each year through effective primary prevention measures — even before illness sets in. The return on investment is also documented: according to the OECD, every euro invested in obesity prevention can generate up to six euros in benefits for society. Conversely, the cost of inaction is massive: tobacco alone is estimated to cost France about 156 billion euros a year, factoring in lost lives and lost productivity.

Five levels of prevention

Five levels of prevention are now recognized. The first three are the oldest and best known; the other two were described starting in the 1970s and 1980s.

• Primordial prevention acts furthest upstream. It seeks to prevent risk factors themselves from ever appearing, starting in childhood, through lifestyle, education, and environment: teaching healthy eating at school, designing cities where people can walk.
• Primary prevention acts before illness, by reducing risk factors that are already present: not smoking, staying active, getting vaccinated.
• Secondary prevention seeks to catch a disease or a risk at an early stage, while it's still easy to act: this is the realm of screening.
• Tertiary prevention aims to limit the complications, after-effects, and relapses of an already established disease: rehabilitation after a heart attack, for example.
• Quaternary prevention protects against overmedicalization: it avoids unnecessary tests and treatments, which expose people to risks without benefit.

Hygietest's tools sit between primary and secondary prevention. They are built on questionnaires and scores validated by research, the same ones doctors themselves use. One point must stay clear: a screening test is not a diagnosis. It estimates a probability and indicates whether it's worth discussing with a healthcare professional. Only a professional can confirm, or rule out, a disease.

The stakes are global. According to the WHO, noncommunicable diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic respiratory disease, cause about 43 million deaths a year, including 18 million before age 70. A large part of this is linked to four factors you can act on: tobacco, alcohol, an unbalanced diet, and lack of physical activity.

A paradox of modern medicine

This paradox isn't unique to France — it's an underlying trend across modern health systems, which invest heavily in treatment and far less in prevention, despite differences from one country to another.

In France, organized prevention accounts for only about 2.3% of health spending, versus 3.4% on average in OECD countries — a gap already documented ten years ago (1.9% versus 3% at the European level), which shows this isn't a temporary blip but an entrenched trend. The United States, despite being the world's top health spender, does no better: prevention there accounts for only 2 to 3% of total spending, a share that has been shrinking since the early 2000s, even as 90% of the $5.3 trillion spent each year on American healthcare goes toward managing chronic diseases — largely preventable or delayable through better upstream prevention.

This pattern shows up, to varying degrees, in most developed countries: the OECD average of 3.4% is itself modest given the well-documented benefits of prevention, and it hides large disparities — some countries invest markedly more than others, and no major Western health system has yet truly reversed the “treatment-first” logic. This paradox is all the more striking given how well documented prevention's benefits actually are.

Hygietest's modest contribution

Hygietest obviously doesn't claim to close this gap on its own. It's one tool among many, on the scale of an effort that goes far beyond what any single website can do. But every simplified screening tool, every person who decides to see a doctor a little sooner because of a result that alerted them, is a stone — modest, but real — added to this larger construction: a medicine that, as Hygieia's name suggests, seeks as much to preserve as to cure.