Editorial: live rough and let docs patch you up?

Photo: Panther Media/Scanpix

The way folks view health has swerved into the treatment extreme. Let me smoke, the doctors will fix me up. Let me drink – and they will purge my blood and restore the liver. Let me stuff my body with food, and the pills and surgery will cut me down to size again.

Just so happens that medical technology has advanced to the stage where «quick fix» for the body looks easier than healthy living.

In an opinion article in Postimees today, health expert Ain Aaviksoo exposes the outcome of living like that. As Estonia built its health care system, it aimed at maximum technology to keep pressure on health insurance as low as possible. Broadly speaking, that was achieved. Even so, people aren’t content and health does not seem to be improving. The bodies are fixed up indeed, but whatever happens before or after – preventive work or rehabilitation – seem to be of less importance. Changes are unavoidable, says Mr Aaviksoo.

The key word here is personal responsibility for one’s health – medicine, then, would remain in supportive role to people’s choices, not focussed on repairs.

Surely, that would take some rearrangements in the medical system, such as increased attention on prevention – screening measurements, regular checks, counselling – which would have to be constant in nature and reach everyone.

But here’s a «but»: we are used to the thinking that a grown-up’s health is his own business and no one has the right to tell him what to do with it. As a rule, the «own business» is meant to be one’s right to ruin his health. But to fix it, someone else is needed.

Meanwhile, the current technology-heavy approach translates into what’s valued and where the money goes: if acquiring of technology seems to make more sense, lion’s share goes towards that, and less for medical workers’ salaries. Prevention, however, isn’t done by machines, but by doctors and nurses.

To tip the scales towards responsible health behaviour, people could use different kind of support from the medical system as well.

Clearly, while talking about such changes, no-one means treatment needs to become secondary; rather, prevention and healthy lifestyles should get a bigger emphasis. 

Neither medicine nor apparatuses may do what we refuse. A couple of days in the hospital can’t compensate for decades of wrong decisions