Fixing health care has become a preeminent goal of the current administration. Many issues face Americans with regards to health care, and there is general agreement that some changes are needed. But while most of the TV airtime is devoted to who will pay for the treatment of illnesses, there is little discussion about a much more important issue: general health maintenance and illness prevention.
It is my firm belief that, unless universal prevention is addressed with as much fervor as universal illness care (it is, after all, not “health care”), the entire project is doomed to failure, given spiraling costs, an expanding population, and increasing longevity.
We live in a consumer society. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines the word “consumer” (from the Latin consumere) as “to eat, use up, or destroy.” We not only consume food, clothing, and other implements of our daily lives, but also use up and destroy natural resources and the environment. Only a few decades ago, our grandparents mended pots, darned socks, and repaired radios, alarm clocks, and toasters. In only two generations, we have changed from a nation of conservers to a nation of destroyers—and, if we believe our politicians, it has somehow become our patriotic duty to buy, use up, and throw away.
This is why preventive health maintenance will be such a difficult concept to implement. The effects are not always immediately obvious. The rewards are difficult to quantify and carry no concrete monetary value. The true benefits accrue over years and may not appear until many years later, a concept alien to a culture of immediate results and instant gratification.
The paradigm of preventive health care is in fact diametrically opposite to the prevailing culture of consumerism. But you can’t use up your body and then get a new one. Our society suffers from an epidemic of preventive illnesses, such as heart disease and diabetes, but there is no “cash for clunkers” program for your heart or your pancreas! So, while we can easily fit one end of the health care debate into the prevailing consumer spirit of “let’s get rid of the old one (e.g., HMOs) and get a new one (i.e., government-run health insurance), the other end—long-term and universal prevention—requires an entirely different mindset, which is alien to how most of us live.
Preventive measures are inexpensive and continue over decades, while medical intervention is expensive and typically takes only days to weeks. The noise, the drama, and urgency of emergency medical care draws our attention away from the less glamorous task of daily exercise, good diet, and other measures of physical and spiritual maintenance.
How to start? Daily exercise can be as inexpensive and mundane as walking briskly in the park. If you like, you can increase the benefits of that walk by combining it with breathing exercises, or Nordic Walking—using a pair of ski pole-like walking sticks. (See www.skiwalking.com.) This technique increases oxygen and calorie consumption by 20 to 40 percent, and effortlessly benefits your chest, arms, and shoulders. The sticks are light and last for years. The cost for your new preventive health care program? Around $70.
The human body is an incredible machine, which has evolved (or, if you prefer, was intelligently designed) to last much longer than most of us actually live. It wears out prematurely from lack of maintenance, both preventive and reparative. Remarkably, many people take better care of their car than their bodies. We leave it to nature to attend to any repairs. We live in the belief that somehow it will be provided for us. And, since our bodies heal, it will—up to the point where things break down.
And that’s when the expenses begin, and when politicians sit up and take notice. Should we tax the wealthy or those who drink sugared drinks? And so the finger-pointing begins. How much better, then, to assume individual responsibility, to take care of our bodies, these vehicles that were provided to take us through the marvelous (and one-time only) journey that is our life.
