Dig the well before you’re thirsty

More hard facts! And some possible solutions

In the area of chronic conditions and prevention, there is a need for a lot of education and a shift in the economics of today’s healthcare management and insurance programs. The science of medicine has turned too much into the business of treatment and as a society, we simply cannot afford following this model.

From the book “The digital pill”, that makes a strong case on prevention of chronic conditions, I have extracted some hard facts. Meant to stir a strong societal wake up call and eventually a shift in allocation of healthcare funding, changes in healthcare policies, population and healthcare professionals education and awareness, more individual responsibility of taking care of one’s health, through support on filtering the headlines from science hard facts, untainted by lobbying or financial interests. Sounds ambitious? It is! But living with chronic conditions vs not being touched by them will make it worth it!

So, here you have some more hard facts and some proposals that can move the dial:

• less than 3% of all healthcare costs are spent on prevention. How about mandating, to start with, a 10%? As citizens living in democratic countries, we give mandates to policy makers to protect public health. We should be more demanding on how this mandate translates into allocation of funding.
• Our healthcare system is not worthy of its name, as the focus is on treating disease instead of safeguarding health. How about incentivizing the industry in the business of healthcare to come up with more prevention solutions? Better to pay for good health than treatments of chronic, life-long debilitating conditions.
• 50% of our chronic conditions are caused by our own lifestyles. We eat too much and the wrong things, don’t exercise enough, smoke too much, drink too much alcohol. While all this is very true, what we are lacking is education of population and scientific facts, free of economical interests. It’s easy to point fingers at the causes, but how about information? Just doing a Google or Pubmed search, one would find numerous studies that vilify, but also praise dairy consumption . One would find studies on mental health disorders ameliorating with complex high-carb intake, while other studies argue low-carb, high fat is the way to go for brain health. If you look at who is behind the funding of the studies, it’s clear that results are more based on financial interests than real concern for public health.

Back in 2015, WHO published a very comprehensive report on the chronic conditions epidemic, with an exhaustive list of measures that could be implemented to stop progression and further increase of these conditions. 2 years later, WHO member states defined robust KPIs that would help move the dial (such as a global goal of cutting salt, sugar and tobacco consumption by 30%, lowering excessive alcohol consumption by 10% etc), yet, 7 years later we are nowhere near these goals. Rollout of the programs to achieve these KPIs has simply not been prioritized, due to lack of funding, and as a result, not much change happened.

From a simple economical perspective (let’s think with our taxpayer wallet and mind), the consequences of having only 3% of less healthcare budget spent on prevention, is triggering devastating consequences, because, unlike acute diseases, which require urgent, but short-lived treatments, chronic conditions generate costs over decades. So, we will be forced to pay more, just to keep afloat and survive, not for living a healthy life.

There’s a Chinese saying that works well in outlining our irresponsible public health approach to chronic condition prevention: Healing an illness is like waiting until you are thirsty before you start digging a well.

#prevention #healthcaremanagement #publichealth #policymakers