Asia’s health crisis is often framed as an inevitability: Aging populations, rising medical costs, a surge in lifestyle diseases, elderly patients needing care for longer. Rates of conditions like heart disease, cancer, diabetes and hypertension are climbing across the region, driven by insufficient exercise, poor diet, drinking, smoking, stress and pollution. These lifestyle diseases now account for roughly 80% of all diagnoses in Asia, a growing burden of morbidity that healthcare systems are struggling to keep pace with.
Yet focusing on lifestyle diseases, and the choices behind them, overlooks the cultural pressures that shape how people think, feel, and behave long before they ever seek medical care. And it’s critical for those of us in the healthcare industry—particularly those of us concerned with keeping people healthy and curing them once they’re sick—to push back against these pressures.
