Are we preventing or simply responding?

Personally, when I take a step back and think, "Ok, what besides insurance needs to change about health care in this country?" my conclusion is nearly always: There has to be a shift from a simply responsive system to one that focuses on prevention from infancy.

Prevention can cover a myriad of fields, and as future public health professionals, I think that we are at the forefront of the future of health care, and where it needs to go.  How do preventive practices get incorporated into the whole of life?  Public policy.  Someone has to take the scientific discoveries and knowledge and make them mainstream.  Whether that means streamlining and making courses of medical treatment consistent no matter where one lives or how much money they have, or whether that means having a few reliable sources where people can look for accurate health information, I don't know.

What I do know is that the vast majority of Americans don't know they are unhealthy until something serious happens -- until they have symptoms.  What if they had been receiving consistent health care their entire lives, even when they were in their mid-twenties and thought they were invincible?  What if they were armed with a constantly updated, easy to use source they could consult about every issue from stress to exercise to safe sex?  Maybe, just maybe, we could bring down the rate of some of these chronic diseases that are largely preventable.

I used to work in clinical cardiology research, focusing on treatment of cholesterol levels as a way to prevent future heart attacks and strokes, and I was constantly amazed by how little these patients knew about what they could actually change and why it would be good for them.  SO much of our American culture emphasizes fixing problems once they have occurred, rather than preventing problems from occurring, and therein lies the root of a large number of our health issues.  And actually, a lot of our other problems too.  I'm not an expert, but I really think that policy change needs to start at the very base of the system -- in other words facilitating that shift from treatment to prevention.  And until medical schools start training new physicians in that manner and some reform happens in the way medical care is paid for, none of this will really have a chance at success.  Maybe Obama can help!