Ode Magazine has a rather lengthy but informative article about focusing on prevention rather than treatment of disease and integrating both lifestyle changes and complementary healing modalities to reduce health care costs.
According to this article “Health care costs are continually rising but people are not getting any healthier. Any reform that does not address this fact will fail.”
The article refers to a study recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine of over 20,000 Germans. Non-smokers who maintain a healthy weight, healthy diet and exercise 30 minutes a day reduce their risk of developing diabetes by 93%, heart attack by 81%, stroke by 50% and cancer by 36%. In a country where about half the population has a chronic illness (that would be US) making these changes could take bring us a lot closer to having an affordable and effective health care system.
