Preventive health care is a critical investment for both individuals and health systems. The whole idea is to proactively take care of your body and mind, ultimately preventing or mitigating conditions that may be detrimental to your health. Unfortunately, many people set themselves up for disaster by neglecting or neglecting preventive health care.
Why is this happening? How do we get people to take preventive health care more seriously?
It's all about prevention
Preventive care for humans is something like Vehicle preventive maintenance. If you take good care of yourself, or take care of your vehicle, you will be much less likely to have problems in the future. This is because humans and machines are complex systems with many intricately interconnected parts; if there is a small problem with one part or the way different parts work together, the situation can quickly get worse and affect the entire system. If you catch these problems early, you can mitigate the damage and prevent problems from getting out of hand.
Preventive health care can:
Identify and correct bad habits. Many people often develop bad habits that endanger their health, often without even realizing it. Seeing a doctor to discuss these habits and evaluate your body can help you identify and correct these bad habits before it's too late.
Capture issues in progress. Preventive medicine is also about identifying problems that already exist. As a simple example, you may find that your cholesterol levels are high despite following the best practices to keep them low. Catching this early means you can combat it before it leads to more serious complications, such as heart disease.
Save time and money. Even if health isn't your top concern, preventive health care can help you save time and money. It's often easier to correct small problems early on than to correct big problems after they develop. As a result, you'll have fewer appointments, less fees, and less hassle.
Why we ignore preventive health care
With all these benefits, why do we ignore preventive health care so often?
Lack of motivation. Some people simply have no motivation to make an appointment when they feel like they don’t have a problem. If a person is not experiencing pain or discomfort, they may see no reason to schedule a regular check-up. Unfortunately, this can cause them to miss problems that don't cause immediately obvious symptoms.
Lack of recognition of interests. Others simply don't realize how beneficial pursuing preventive health care can be. They may view regular dates as a trivial act that isn't really necessary, especially if those dates have seemed fruitless in the past.
Fear or worry. many people Afraid of going to the doctoror worried about how their date will go. Some people have bad records with doctors and hospitals. Others worry that if they go to the doctor, they will find out they have some terrible disease or complication. In any case, they were unwilling to make new appointments.
Complexity issues. Scheduling a preventive appointment doesn't have to be difficult, but there are so many steps involved that it can be intimidating for many people. Navigating the complexities of the modern healthcare system can be challenging.
cost issue. Preventive medicine is designed to be affordable, and with a good insurance policy, preventive appointments are often free or very cheap. Still, not everyone has the spare money to go to the doctor on a regular basis without any worries.
How we can change our attitude towards preventive care
So what can we do?
Making preventive health care easier and more accessible. Preventive medical appointments should be easy, and preventive care should be more accessible to more people. Obviously, realizing this reality is easier said than done. But if we can solve this problem and make health care more accessible, we can make many people's lives better.
Raise public awareness. Already have many public health campaigns Dedicated to helping people become more aware of the importance of preventive healthcare. However, they may not have gone far enough. The average person should know exactly how important it is to attend regular preventive screenings and exams.
IThe state rewards people who get preventive attention. We could also modify our systems to specifically reward people for getting preventive health care. For example, we can set things up so that people can earn feature points from their insurance company by participating in activities such as annual physical exams.
Preventive health care is still very important, even though we seem indifferent to it in many cases. Even with some changes in our cultural attitudes toward preventive health care, we might be able to change how many people take advantage of it.