How About a Pound of Prevention?
A consortium of health organizations, pharmaceutical companies, insurance providers and state health departments called The Partnership for Prevention has released a list of what it considers to be the top 25 health services available to prevent the development of disease. The list is based on the impact these services have in preventing illness, injury and death, plus their cost-effectiveness. Of course as we all know, no preventive health measure has ever been able to reduce the death rate below 100%. Keep that in mind as you consider tearfully tossing your Cuban cigars into the trash.
Included in the list are such well-founded services such as daily low-dose aspirin use, colorectal cancer screening, blood pressure checks, vaccinations, tobacco and alcohol counseling, Pap smears and treatment of high cholesterol. Since the list was ranked according to importance some health preventive services were considered by the Partnership to be less valuable than others. Listed below are some of the preventive measures actually ranked lower than “vision screening for adults aged 65 and older.”
Obesity screening (given the status of the population this is also known as “opening one’s eyes”)
Hearing screening (a complete waste of time in most men, who are afflicted with acquired selective deafness syndrome)
Injury prevention screening (talk about a Sisyphean task - who is going to tell Grandpa that he has to give up driving, or ask Dad to give up his weekend hobbies?)
Diet counseling (Excuse me for one second - “No, I said supersize the entire order, not just the fries, you moron!” Now, what were we discussing?)
I can understand putting a hearing test below a vision test, but obesity screening and diet counseling? Come on now, everywhere we go we are bombarded with the news that American kids and adults are too fat, which leads to health problems, which leads to an early grave, and who would ever want us to suffer that fate?
Not me - I’m eating healthy! In fact, I’m so committed to following the 25 Steps I think I shall go home and exercise right now.
What’s that you say? Exercise is not on the list?
Oh, okay. I feel so much better now. See you on the couch.
And don’t get me started on the reworked food pyramid! Bah
Comment by promenea — May 18, 2006 @ 10:52 am
Cancer is a disease that affects even people who do the right thing, so the “cause” (or fault, as this individual focus implies) is not going to be found by pointing fingers at the individual. Rather, the cancer industry must begin to acknowledge that the 5 per cent of funds raised–primarily by cancer sufferers and their families–which is slated to PREVENTION is ludicrously inadequate. Why does the cancer industry refuse to put it’s focus on environmental carcinogens?
“The main error of the biomedical approach is the confusion between disease processes and disease origins. Instead of asking why an illness occurs, and trying to remove the conditions that lead to it, medical researchers try to understand the biological mechanisms through which the disease operates, so that they can interfere with them … These mechanisms, rather than the true origins, are seen as the causes of disease in current medical thinking and this confusion lies at the very centre of the conceptual problems of contemporary medicine.
Fritjof Capra ‘The Turning Point – Science, Society and the Rising Culture’ Simon & Schuster USA 1982 pp149-150″{
Comment by Pony — June 8, 2006 @ 6:19 am
And why do cancer researchers not focus on why cancer occurs?
“A firm alliance between the established cancer institutions and the chemical, pharmaceutical and nuclear industries has formed the medical-industrial complex … At its best, this complex provides better diagnosis, new treatments and first rate health-care facilities. At its worst, the medical-industrial complex blocks an all-embracing programme for preventing cancer … What is stopping us [from getting serious about prevention] is the almost suffocating hold the medical industrial complex retains over cancer policy, and the hugely powerful chemical industry’s interest in protecting its products.
Professor Ross Hume Hall ‘The Medical- Industrial Complex’ pp62-68 The Ecologist Vol 28 no2 1998″
Comment by Pony — June 8, 2006 @ 6:24 am