Preventive medicine will also be practiced more widely. This will be a boon to the consumer as well as helping to keep medical costs manageable. Preventive medicine not only helps a health care provider detect and treat an illness in its early stages, it also involves established ongoing patient education programs, which gets the patient more involved in his health care and therefore more likely to follow the instructions of his health care provider.
To give you an example, consider one of my female patients, who is at risk for developing diabetes, since her mother was diabetic. She schedules regular checkups with me during which we monitor her blood sugar level and I provide nutritional counseling so she can prevent the disease from developing. If she did have the disease, we would then continue to keep tabs on her condition on a regular basis in order to prevent some of the more severe complications of the disease from developing.
For instance, if she had diabetes, not only would she be seen by her primary care physician, we would recommend she have routine eye care and checkups done by an ophthalmologist in our HMO. She’d also visit with a nutritional counselor, who could advise her about diet and exercise methods that would help keep her disease from progressing. We might also want her to regularly check in with a nurse practitioner, who could help her with her medications and answer any questions she might have. All these health care providers will be part of a local health care network in which they’ll be integrated between outpatient care and the hospital. Clearly, patients will benefit greatly from this new system of total care.
Again, I want to reassure you that even though the way medical care is provided will change under ongoing health reform plans, it will result in better, more focused care for everybody. Of course, you may no longer be able to see a physician for a routine complaint, but you will receive better-quality, more coordinated treatment when a more serious illness or condition strikes. That’s where Body Signals comes in. By showing you how to recognize your body’s classic symptoms of distress, you’ll be in a strong position to work within this new system, discern when professional attention is required, and convey this need to those in charge of your health care.
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