This paper assesses the current conceptual trend in General Medicine / Family, Public and Collective Health regarding quaternary prevention. The goals are to identify and disseminate this type of prevention and reflect on their epistemological and ethical discourses. The methodology is qualitative, of hermeneutic type. We begin by recalling the three dimensions of disease prevention, developing its fourth type, which is a kind of prevention of the above. Then we address the allocation of the urgency of quaternary prevention to some specific groups: doctors, elderly, "pseudo-patients" and psychiatric patients. Next, we assessed whether the basic principles of bioethics are not addressed (and how developed) in this type of prevention. Although we have previously outlined some criticism, we opened a section especially for this, in which we epistemologically and ethically disassembled texts of that lineage, resulting in speeches not always consistent or aligned with effective clinical practice. We emphasize the dualistic discourse that hides behind most texts, and defeats the defending alleged holism. The research result is that the main proponents of this type of prevention using a speech is not always consistent, either epistemologically or ethically. We conclude that, being a very useful expression in clinical practice, the quaternary prevention needs to be theoretically clarified and more widespread among - and dialogued with - health professionals of various specialties.
quaternary prevention; epistemology; bioethics