Preventive healthcare is a crucial investment, both for individuals and for the medical system. The whole idea is to take proactive care of your body and mind, ultimately preventing or mitigating conditions that would otherwise jeopardize your health. Unfortunately, many people skip or neglect preventative healthcare, setting themselves up for disaster.
Why is this the case? And how can we get people to take preventive health care more seriously?
It's All About Being Preventative
Preventative care for humans is a bit like preventative maintenance for vehicles. If you take good care of your body, or if you take good care of your vehicle, you'll be much less likely to run into issues in the future. That's because both human bodies and machines are complex systems with many complexly interrelated parts; if there's a small problem with one part or the way different parts work together, it can quickly become worse and affect the entire system. If you catch these problems early enough, you can mitigate the damage and prevent them from spiraling out of control.
Preventative healthcare can:
Identify and correct bad habits. Many people engage in bad habits regularly that put their health in jeopardy, often without even realizing it. Visiting the doctor and discussing these habits, as well as evaluating your body, can help you identify and correct these bad habits before it's too late.
Catch problems in progress. Preventative medicine is also about catching problems that are already in progress. As a simple example, you might find out that you have high cholesterol, despite engaging in best practices to keep cholesterol levels low. Catching this early means you can fight against it before it leads to more serious complications, like heart disease.
Save time and money. Even if health isn't your primary concern, preventative health care can help you save time and money. Correcting a small issue early on is usually much easier than correcting a big issue once it's already developed. As a result, you'll have fewer appointments, lower expenses, and fewer headaches along the way.
Why We Neglect Preventative Healthcare
With all these benefits, why do we neglect preventative health care so regularly?
Lack of motivation. Some people simply aren't motivated to make appointments when they feel like there's nothing wrong with them. If a person isn't in pain and isn't uncomfortable, they may see no reason to make an appointment for a regular physical. Unfortunately, this can cause them to miss issues that don't cause immediately noticeable symptoms.
Lack of recognition of benefits. Other people simply don't recognize how beneficial it is to pursue preventative healthcare. They may see regular appointments as a trivial exercise that isn't truly necessary, especially if those appointments have seemed fruitless in the past.
Fear or worry. Many people fear going to the doctor, or have worries about how their appointments might go. Some people have a bad history with doctors and hospitals. Others have a looming fear that if they visit the doctor, they'll find out they have some terrible disease or complication. Either way, they become reluctant to make new appointments.
Complexity concerns. Scheduling a preventative appointment isn't necessarily hard, but there are enough steps involved that it becomes intimidating for many people. Navigating the complexities of our modern healthcare system can be challenging.
Cost concerns. Preventative medicine is designed to be cheap, and with good insurance policies, preventative appointments are often free or highly inexpensive. Still, not everyone has the spare money to visit doctors regularly without concern.
How We Can Change Our Preventative Healthcare Attitudes
So what can we do about this?
Make preventative healthcare easier and more accessible. It should be easy to make preventative healthcare appointments and preventative care should be more accessible to more people. Obviously, achieving this reality is easier said than done. But if we can solve this problem and make healthcare more available, we can change many lives for the better.
Improve public awareness. There are already many public health campaigns dedicated to helping people better understand the importance of preventative healthcare. However, they arguably haven't gone far enough. The average person should understand exactly how valuable it is to attend regular preventative screenings and check-ups.
Instate rewards for getting preventative attention. We could also modify our system to concretely reward people for getting preventative healthcare. For example, we could set things up so that people earn functional credits with insurance companies for attending things like annual physicals.
Preventative healthcare remains highly important, despite our seeming apathy to it in many cases. With even a few changes to our cultural attitudes toward preventative healthcare, we may be able to make a difference in how many people take advantage of it.
