I have posted a number of previous notes about chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. It's not an overstatement to label this deluge of gnarly health problems as an epidemic although the term is usually reserved for acute infectious diseases. A blog note by Dr. Benjamin Brewer caught my attention because it proposes a possible new approach. Below is an excerpt from it (see: Chronic Disease Battle Requires Better Tools:
The chronic disease epidemic is upon us. Patients with health problems are younger and fatter. I had to buy a heavy-duty scale last year to replace the one I started in practice with a decade ago. I have more obese patients now and needed something accurate up to 400 lbs. When I was growing up, nearly half the kids in this country walked or rode their bikes to school. By the early part of this decade, the figure had dropped to about 15%....Certainly there is more we can do to help ourselves. We can be active with our kids. We can exercise more and eat less. The biggest challenge in primary-care medicine is dealing with the complications of obesity, diabetes and hypertension. We have drugs to treat the conditions. But we don't have potent enough public health measures, patient education and follow-up monitoring to avoid the heart attacks, strokes and chronic kidney problems that come with the modern disease territory.
What an illuminating short piece! ! My two children would often wave goodbye to my wife and I as we set off on our long-distance bike rides -- much different than the setting when I was growing up and always on my bike. As suggested by Dr. Brewer, we need to develop more "infectious" public health education measures so that our citizens understand that they are killing themselves with their so-called life-styles, their lack of exercise, and their poor eating habits. Little that we are currently doing in terms of health education seems to be working. We need to develop new tools to get "Joe Average" to pay more attention to his health and take more positive measures to stay healthy. Don't look to our politicians for help. The various components of the food and agricultural industry have most of them under very effective control.
Let's extend Dr. Brewer's basic idea. Some private foundation needs to launch a competition to come up with a new approach to consumer health education about how to avoid chronic diseases. Offer a million dollar prize for the best solution. I suspect that the winning solution (1) will involve the web, (2) will be interactive, and (3) will not come from the public health education community. I also suspect that all or part of such a program will be deployed on cell phones (see: Making e-Health Information Accessible with Smart Phones).
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