Word: chronic
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...hundreds of billions of dollars to fix. But I trust it's different for most of us. When it comes to individual health care, the model these days is not treating illness but preventing it. The prescription is prevention. Three-quarters of our health-care costs are attributable to chronic, preventable diseases. The way to avoid them (as well as expensive treatments) is to eat well, exercise, get checkups, vaccinate your kids and mind your mental state. That will help you--and help the health-care system as a whole...
...Korean access to a wide swath of online university databases. That could provide critical assistance to Pyongyang's multiple development challenges, including growing enough food to feed its people; the country suffered a famine in the mid-'90s that claimed 2 million to 3 million lives and still suffers chronic malnutrition...
...Whether insured or uninsured people are crowding in, an overreliance on EDs means that less preventive medicine and less chronic-disease management is happening, which is part of the reason prevention is a central tenet of the current health-care-reform discussion. In other words, if the ED is the last, and sometimes only, resort for very sick people, then the health-care system as a whole is still very ill. "We can't hospitalize our way to human health," says Asplin. "One of the tragedies of the uninsured is that when they get to us, sometimes...
...lesson can be learned from health care in the developed world, it's that chronic diseases are a lot less costly when they're prevented from the start: up to 80% of premature death from heart disease, stroke and diabetes can be avoided with basic behavioral changes and inexpensive drug treatments. But so far there has been little effort to tailor those interventions to low- and middle-income nations, such as China and Brazil, where chronic diseases are expected to take a serious toll in coming decades. "Avoiding tobacco, improving nutrition and getting more exercise - we know this works," says...
...GACD hopes to pool its members' experience and resources to identify, test and implement the best ways to slow the progress of chronic diseases - both in developed and developing nations. That will be a tall order, particularly since no specific funding has been allocated for the GACD and because chronic diseases work slowly and frequently fall to the bottom of global health priorities. It's important to remember also that the rising rate of chronic diseases in developing nations does nothing to relieve the co-existing burden of infectious diseases like tuberculosis - many such countries now face a "double burden...