Well, well, well, I thought, as I read the special report in the USA Today, "Drug Revolution Shakes Industry."1 The report touted medicine's changing mission of disease prevention, requiring that the pharmaceutical industry develop drugs that help prevent or delay disease rather than just treating the end results. The gist of the article was that the trend in medicine is now "prevention" because of a "dawning realization that even better versions of traditional remedies are failing against such diseases as Alzheimer's, heart disease and cancer." This signals a critical shift regarding the future focus of research money and marketing.
For years, we chiropractors have been saying that the prevention of injury and disease is the surest method to achieve and maintain good health at any age. Ridiculed by the "powers that be" in the past in favor of the great advances the pharmaceutical companies had made in the eradication of disease after its appearance, the idea of prevention was never considered to have much merit.
Why prevention? Why now? The realization that there will never be the perfect magic bullet for all the world's ills may be part of this phenomenal shift, but the timeliness of the prevention concept is motivated by a combination of other factors:
Prevention is the brother of wellness. A healthy population costs less than a sick population; a healthy population uses fewer and less costly medical services; and healthy people miss fewer work/school days, resulting in steadier production, and on and on.
For much of its history, geriatric population studies dealt strictly with disease. Age and disease/disability were perceived to go hand-in-hand. Shifting the focus to prevention allows millions of government research dollars to become available to study the 95 percent of the geriatric population who still live in the community. Here researchers are finding an even more dramatic distinction between age and disease as they uncover the characteristics, habits and lifestyle patterns of healthy, older adults. Some of these individuals have been practicing healthy diet and exercise habits for 40 or 50 years! These elders chose wellness and health decades ago.
Wellness is a powerful concept. In terms of practice, this should be a great year. With the media emphasizing prevention of illness and injury, you can expect more new patients to chiropractic. Part of the importance of your mission as a chiropractor is to educate your patients about their responsibility to maintain it. Consider offering a class to discuss the current health topics and issues. Display posters in the office promoting the class and list the topics to be covered. Add some controversial ones to get your students eager to participate. After all, wellness is the key to everyone's quality of life.
As always, if you have a particular question or would like to see a topic covered in a future column, please contact me by e-mail, or send a self-addressed stamped envelope to the address below. Aloha!
References
Many relevant diagnostic signs are not performed deliberately by the examiner or by the patient at the examiner’s direction. They are observed as the patient reacts to their condition. Fortin’s finger sign, Minor’s sign, and Vanzetti’s sign are three examples of this principle.
Spearheaded by burgeoning scientific and clinical research literature, psychedelics have reached a level of media coverage and popular interest that has not been seen for over half a century. By “psychedelics,” we are referring to the unique class of substances that includes psilocybin (the active compound found in so-called “magic mushrooms”), LSD, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, and mescaline – each of which occurs in the natural world (except for LSD, which is a semi-synthetic compound).
While working at the Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque, N.M., one of the primary care physicians stated that imaging every patient prior to receiving chiropractic was not medically necessary. It was at that point I reconsidered the need for the imaging of every patient to avoid malpractice.
