By: Br. Adel Eldin
The most valuable commodity we have is our health! Simply stated, without it, you could never enjoy any of your wealth. No matter how much money you have when you are sick, you will never be able to enjoy it, especially if you are, in fact, going to lose most or all of it on healthcare bills. A lot of my patients share with me that they actually feel sicker when they see their healthcare bills in the mailbox.
It is reported that the number one cause for bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills; healthcare is simply too expensive. Unfortunately, spending so much money on healthcare does not even necessarily translate into better health outcomes. This is evidenced by the fact that US is the biggest spender in the world on healthcare but ranked number 37 when measured with clinical outcome data, which is the bottom line!
There has been a lot of research done about cost effectiveness in many top universities, such as Harvard and others, to calculate the cost of Healthcare dollars for various diagnoses. They are looking to develop appropriate guidelines for the management of patients without breaking the bank.
One important factor in the fight against such high healthcare bills is being proactive in disease prevention and wellness. Doing a spot fix or acute disease management without addressing entire head-to-toe care has caused so much waste in the overall US healthcare dollars.
So, after full diagnosis of the current unhealthy healthcare system, each of us should look for an effective wellness treatment strategy to help prevent chronic diseases before they require such expensive measures to treat them. We need to look into eating healthier diets, exercising more and paying careful attention to signals from our bodies that something may be wrong. The more in tune we are with our bodies, the quicker we can detect signs of change or illness, and we can, thereby, get less invasive, less expensive and more effective treatment.