Show T MEDICALLY Y t CP SPEAKING I y yAn Vernal Family Health Center An ounce of prevention fly t I MI Mf Not long ago Winder who is in charge of the American lI Health alth Foundation in New York said the following A growing among health experts sees our health system failing because it provides too much care too loo late It treats the patient when he is already diseased and when despite the sophistication of the treatment very little can be bedone bedone bedone done to relieve the disability or extend the patients patient's life Clearly a new approach is i's needed and that approach has to be the practice of preventive medicine If one looks at the cost of medical care over the last 30 years one finds that in 1950 the health care across the country was estimated at 12 billion By 1970 the cost of medical care had risen to 70 billion By 1975 it had risen to billion which represented slightly over 8 percent of our gross national product We have to do something to change these costs and most people agree that the best place to start is initiation of better preventative care Now in the past the concept of preventative health care has been primarily that of im im- The question is how amenable are the current leading causes of death to preventative medicine In the 1973 medical census the leading causes of death in men from ages 54 35 were the following 1 1 heart disease 2 death from lung cancer 3 3 death from accidents primarily automobile accidents 4 cirrhosis of the liver 5 strokes I ask you now how many of those deaths were preventable In women the number one cause of death was breast cancer 2 heart disease 3 strokes 4 accidents 5 cirrhosis o of the liver Again how many of or orI I those deaths are acts acts' of men and h how w many lre acts ads of God Lets Let's consider the causes of these accidents taking the men first in reverse First of or all strokes A common cause as you know of strokes is hypertension and a common primary cause of hypertension is obesity Because of poor self-discipline self in most obese patients a physician cannot treat a primary cause of hypertension which is obesity and has to wind up eventually putting the patient on medical therapy to control his hypertension It Il was estimated in 1975 that we had 50 million Americans that were one billion pounds overweight Cirrhosis of the liver the most common cause of which is without question guestion the abuse of alcohol is the number 4 cause of death in men and the number 5 cause of death in women Certainly this disease is preventable What about number 3 deaths from auto accidents Probably the best way to control deaths from auto accidents is to control the drinking drinkin driver Over one-half one of the fatalities from highway accidents are associated with drivers who are intoxicated In some countries of the world if you are caught driving while intoxicated it is a mandatory jail sentence in some cases as long as 5 3 years If you are caught driving in Canada without your seatbelt seatbelt seat seat- belt it is a mandatory fine and if you are involved in an accident accident accident ac ac- ac- ac in Canada when you are not using your seatbelt you may have to pay up to 1000 fine Studies done by safety organizations indicate that we could probably cut down the number of auto accident deaths by half if we were to use our safety belts and seat harnesses In 1975 it was estimated that only 4 percent of Americans used shoulder harnesses and only 25 percent of Americans drive with their safety belts on on- on because you see it will never happen to me it always happens to the other person That attitude altitude is true tine with the number 2 leading cause of death among males from 54 35 lung cancer Out of who died in America in 1975 some had a standing long-standing history of cigarette smoking In 1975 the US U.S. Public Health Service estimated that some deaths in the United Stales States were reI related a ted to the use of tobacco and yet since 1948 the US U.S. Government has subsidized subsidized subsidized sub sub- the tobacco industry to the tune of million You see I it t doesn't quite make sense We keep paying for the overwhelming overwhelming overwhelming over over- whelming costs of disease but what are we doing to put the blunt of the effort into the control of disease We know that the person who smokes over one pack of cigarettes a day is three times as likely to die from a heart attack as the pipe smoker or the former cigarette smoker There are now studies that indicate that if you quit smoking cigarettes you can get down into a low low risk category as far faras faras faras as cardi cardiovascular vascular disease is concerned within a period of six weeks However we also know that if you stop smoking cigarettes today t to get into as low Iowa a risk category as a nonsmoker nonsmoker nonsmoker non- non smoker as far as lung cancer is concerned may take you as a long longa a period as 20 years This would also be true with other lung diseases such as and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease Now how about number 1 I cardiovascular disease Studies are now proving that if if you practice four preventative measures proper weight control diet exercise and the avoidance of tobacco that physiological alterations will occur in your body that will prevent the onset of the development of ar- ar and consequently consequently consequently con con- cardiovascular disease Yet how many of our middle aged Americans are applying these four therapeutic modes Future studies in this column will deal with preventive medicine Special attention willbe will willbe willbe be devoted to the four preventive measures of cardiovascular cardiovascular car car- disease |