Seventy five percent of health care spending is for preventable chronic diseases. If you can prevent these diseases from occurring, it stands to reason that it will cost far less to deal with them. However, there is massive confusion about what preventive medicine is. What it is not is early detection.
Preventive medicine requires living a healthy lifestyle through diet, exercise, adequate sleep, stress reduction, avoidance of toxic environmental exposures, managing weight and having a meaningful purpose in life. This is about personal empowerment through self-care and is achievable through education.
Early detection is often not cost effective and may lead to unnecessary expendatures, over-testing, worry, and overtreatment, and worse outcomes according to the United States Preventive Services Task Force.
Because health care has become a business first, and a service if possible, it is difficult to find the right balance of self-care and the use of our health care system for both early detection and treatment of health care conditions.
