The new ministry wants more preventive medicine in health policies. Cheer.
Our country abounds in various treatments, accessible to the vast majority, but it is very behind in the preventive field. Even for the vaccines, we had to go through the obligations, so foreign is the idea of prevention to our culture of assitance.
Prevention is very distinct from treatment, the former depends on the individual and the latter on medicine. This distinction is so fundamental that the term preventive medicine can be seen as a misinterpretation. We should speak of preventive individuality, which is forged through education and depends on multiple psycho-social traits, none of which is in the register of medicine. Education comes from school and family, psycho-social traits from all but the medical environment.
In addition, medicine confuses prevention with prediction. Prevention consists in avoiding or delaying diseases, prediction consists in establishing risks of diseases. Screening for cancer, cholesterol, arterial hypertension, aneurysms or alleles are theoretical and risky predictions. The preventions which can follow these predictions are identical to those which precede them. You must not smoke before or after cancer, you must walk before and after cholesterol or hypertension. As for aneurysms and unfavorable alleles, let us lucidly accept our limits. Moreover, these predictions are often perverse, suggesting that secondary prevention pharmacology dispenses with individual primary prevention, which is always more effective.
Not only are medicine and prevention definitely incompatible, but the stronger the medical presence, the weaker the prevention.
So why entrust prevention to the Ministry of Health? Have we been misguided to the point of considering that the primary management of our body can only be entrusted to professionals?
Another answer seems simpler to me. It is easier and much less costly to offer free consultations to 25, 45 and 65 year olds, as has just been done, than to eradicate tobacco and sodas, than to divide meat consumption by four, than to remove vehicles in cities, que de, que de, etc. Everyone has their own idea, and all of them are catastrophic for the GDP…
My remarks are of a banal naivety. So, to be more brazen, knowing that the balance sheets and check-ups have never had the slightest health effect, I propose the most likely scenario that will follow these new free consultations. We will find more and more cholesterol and sugar in the blood, more and more cognitive deficits, depressive syndromes, neglected pain, cancerous cells. So many wonderful additional markets for secondary pharmacological prevention.
Mr. Minister, the healthcare industry will never thank you enough.