While it may already be too late
for baby boomers to take preventive steps to avoid painful chronic diseases, there is still plenty of
time to encourage the next generation to
avoid health care mistakes.
“The main thing we can do about today’s
chronic conditions is to lessen the pain,”
says Tim Stover, M.D., senior vice president of the Akron General Health System.
Stover strongly advises younger generations to take the right steps today for
wellness and prevention to avoid the
painful issues they could face tomorrow.
Chronic disease prevention and management programs should be a critical component of anyone’s wellness program,
he adds.
“We didn’t know so much about front-end prevention and wellness back then,”
Stover says. “But, today, we do have good
wellness programs that can help younger
generations avoid the same situations.”
Smart Business spoke with Stover
about chronic conditions and how chronic disease prevention and management
programs can help you and your employees, now and in the future.
What are chronic diseases?
These are things that will probably not
kill you but will be with you for the rest of
your life. We are talking about issues like
diabetes, heart disease, the rheumatoid
complex and autoimmune system diseases. All chronic diseases cause pain and
discomfort. Chronic illness defines those
disease processes that patients will have
for the remainder of their lives. Many will
have more than one. These co-morbidities
include diabetes, cardiovascular disease,
renal disease and congestive heart failure.
When any one of these requires acute hospitalization, the other issues always add a
potential for complications.
What can individuals over 50 do about their
situations now?
Health care today is not about health
care, it’s about sick care, and we are headed for the perfect storm of sick care.
Older individuals will demand more care resources, but there will be a scarcity of
primary care physicians and a Medicare
program that will be insolvent. With
Health Savings Accounts becoming more
popular today, patients are paying higher
co-pays or deductibles out-of-pocket.
Paying for these chronic conditions will
be a hardship for many. But, even if you’re
over 50, it is not too late to change your
choices. The problem is, many of us don’t
do this until we have that ‘fox-hole’ experience — the heart attack, the stroke, getting adult onset diabetes, an auto accident; then we decide to change what
we’ve been doing.
A wellness program helps you make
those choices before the fox-hole event
hits. Simple everyday things such as eating healthy and exercising will make a difference. These things are not difficult or
expensive — but actually doing them is
another thing altogether. Besides being
generally good for you, exercise is a well-documented treatment for many ailments, including hypertension, diabetes,
rheumatoid arthritis, mild congestive
heart failure, post heart attack and
stroke, joint disease, chronic back pain
and headaches.
For each age group, will wellness programs
help avoid problems?
Many of these chronic problems could
have been prevented by better lifestyle
choices. Five choices are responsible for
70 to 80 percent of chronic health care
expenditures today — smoking, alcohol,
obesity, driving fast and lack of exercise.
These are choices we, as a society, make
every day. Health care should be exactly
that, health care. Do what you can to stay
out of hospitals — wellness is free.
How do you push wellness to the younger
generations?
It is important for people to inform their
children of their medical histories, so the
children are aware of the possible conditions that they may face. And, show them
that wellness is important to you. Once
you start making the changes and it
becomes part of your lifestyle, your children will listen. Advise any younger person that there are many things that he or
she could be doing now that could prevent osteoporosis and other chronic diseases. Tell younger people to think of one
of their relatives who has had that fox-hole experience, and then ask that person
how he or she got there. Except for accidents, congenital illnesses and some cancers, there was a choice that put that person in the condition he or she is dealing
with now. Most people recognize that fact.
There will always be illnesses that can’t
be avoided, but many patients do not realize how much of their futures are in their
hands. This is why I think the message for
wellness has never be more important to
the younger generation — if the patient is
now responsible for paying for the result
of poor lifestyle choices, and we know
staying as well as we can is cheaper,
which would most choose? I think most
people would choose wellness. But as
long as someone else pays for our bad
choices, what incentive is there to stay
well?
TIM STOVER, M.D. is the senior vice president of the Akron General Health System and the medical director of Akron General’s Health
and Wellness Centers. Reach him at [email protected].
