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If you care about health – your health, kids health, the health of the health care system, the direction of health reform, or being up-to-date on the changes in the health field, you will want to listen to Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation. Believe it or not, this hearing of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on health care reform with physician/ educator/ and activists Andrew Weil, download poker club the movie download cocoon movie Mark Hyman, Mehmet Oz and Dean Ornish,
and expertly chaired by health promotion advocates Senators Tom Harkin and Barbara Mikulski, is riveting to watch.
To suggest that there is a holistic overhaul underway of ingrained ideas about health, from health education to how it’s practiced and incentivized, is not overstating the case. The speakers brought tremendous creativity, pragmatism and examples of proven solutions to long-standing problems. The key takeaway is the need to build a culture of wellness, to make care patient-centered, and to offer incentives for healthy lifestyles, ones that make it easy to make healthy choices.
Some highlights of the discussion:
o Convert our disease care system into one focused on health. Conventional medicine doesn’t have the tools to treat chronic illness, the number one burden on health care costs.
o Focus on simple lifestyle changes that are proven to prevent and to reverse chronic illnesses, including heart disease, diabetes, colitis, hypertension, COPD, some cancers, and other diseases.
o Use an integrative approach with a range of therapies alongside scientific medicine to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Focus on keeping people healthy rather than caring for them after they are sick.
o Language matters. Prevention is associated with fear of sickness and death, so people avoid thinking about it; it’s demotivating. Promoting wellness is about taking joy in living.
o Globalize medicine. Teams of experts in a range of modalities deliver the best care. These include massage therapists, exercise physiologists, nutritionists, yoga, aromatherapists, Reiki, doctors, and social workers, etc.
o Make service in a Health Corps the norm, like AmeriCorps. Every 18 yr old are trained to become health coaches and activists for healthy lifestyle change. This program is already in place in several states.
o Allow people to take their health records with them. This offers them control and enhances their ability to engage in responsible self-care.
o Make it easy to practice a healthy lifestyle. It doesn’t help to recommend eating whole grains if they’re not available.
o Make health and wellness education the norm in children’s education K-12. Make it fun and interactive.
o Create a White House Office for Health and Wellness to coordinate activities and initiatives.
o Create federally funded community health center demonstration projects to show how patient-centered care focused on wellness and lifestyle change changes outcomes and reduces costs in communities. Models programs already exist.
o Reverse current incentives so that a $200 program to prevent diabetes is reimbursable, rather than a $10,000 foot amputation.
o Make training in integrative medicine required for residents in all medical schools, as is already the case in several universities.
o Examine how government subsidies in agriculture play a role in providing incentives for food manufacturers to use poor quality substitutes in foods. High fructose syrup, a leading factor in the extraordinary rise of insulin resistance, leading to diabetes and heart disease, is a case in point. Refined soybean oil with its inflammatory sequela is another.
As Senator Mikulski suggests, we are witnessing an object lesson in how broad social movements take root to create coherent new systems for getting things done, and that government’s role is to institutionalize those initiatives. The hearing is rich listening and a glimpse of what can work in health care.sleeping with ghosts download mp3 download vamp movie
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1 Comment so far
Love this post! Thanks for sharing this…..
Thanks ~ there is good news rising to the surface! k