Institute of Medicine’s New Focus on Preventative Health Care
If you’re overweight, your doctor might have told you to exercise more and cut down on certain types of food. But did your doctor also tell you to get more sleep, drink more water, and reduce stress levels, or how to exercise without causing your body more stress? Too often, doctors and other health professionals focus on treating disease, rather than on preventative health care. The health care system is “crisis-oriented,” meaning that instead of showing patients how to prevent disease, many doctors tend to treat symptoms when they appear – which is partly why many seniors opt for Medicare Part D coverage, which treats the problem through drug therapy, rather than preventative care. And those same doctors often prescribe medication rather than suggesting their patients adopt lifestyle changes that might do the job more effectively and naturally.
About the Institute of Medicine
The Institute of Medicine, one of the country’s most prestigious and well-respected medical groups, hopes to begin to change that, by promoting an approach called “integrative medicine.” This approach focuses less on treating symptoms as they appear, and more on whole-body and mind wellness as a preventative measure.
Integrative medicine goes far beyond disease and symptom treatment to include not only lifestyle changes, but also the mind-body connection, in its assessment and prevention of illness. This approach also helps patients understand the importance of lifestyle changes, and of keeping up with recommended lifestyle changes over the long term.
However, there’s a significant barrier that might prevent such a project from getting off the ground – where will the money come from? According to the Institute of Medicine, preventing disease costs less than treating disease, but initiating an integrative medicine program on a larger scale would require a hefty up-front cash injection.
Even so, many well-respected medical centers are beginning to adopt various types of integrative approaches.
At Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, for example, health coaches have been trained to help patients develop personalized health care plans that complement the treatment prescribed by their doctors.
The High-risk Heart Disease Example
A Medicare-funded study at the medical center focused on 154 people with high risk of heart disease. After ten months, people who received weekly health coaching had kept up an exercise program of three to four days a week and had an average cholesterol reduction of ten points. Wellness doesn’t have to be complicated, and centers such as that at Duke University are definitely proving that. Getting plenty of sleep, good nutrition, and regular stress-busting exercise, for example, can help fight off infection and speed up the pace of healing, all without doctor’s visits or medication.
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