An Ounce of Prevention ...

Kendra Campbell -- We had a lecture last week on hypertension for our "Doctor, Patient and Society" class. Our professor made an interesting comment, which I’ve been pondering over for the past couple of days. He mentioned that untreated hypertension is an important cause of kidney failure. If left untreated, hypertension can lead to a patient having to go on dialysis and can eventually lead to death. For more affluent patients in the U.S. and other developed countries, this is not something that they’ll ever have to face. With the proper medical attention, a patient with hypertension can live until a ripe old age and will never have to worry about facing the frightening prospect of undergoing dialysis. But there are many people who are not so lucky as to have the benefit of adequate medical care.

My professor used an interesting analogy to describe the current situation of hypertensive patients worldwide. He said that if you blindfolded him, and placed him in the dialysis unit of any hospital in the world, he would immediately be able to ascertain how developed the country was, merely by looking around at how many of the dialysis patients were there because of untreated hypertension. The reality of healthcare in America is that the dialysis unit of a hospital in Kenya, compared to a hospital in an impoverished neighborhood in Chicago, may look exactly the same. Most of the patients on dialysis are not there because all attempts at preventing kidney damage had failed, but because they had not received any preventive medicine which would have treated the hypertension before it led to organ damage.

The solution to our international healthcare problems is certainly not obvious. Everyone has their own version of the answer. The reality is that improving the health of humans on this planet is a task which will never be completely finished. But it seems obvious to me that one of the easiest things we can do is focus on preventive medicine. If we can do something now to address the health of the world’s population, perhaps we can alleviate the need later on to find ways to heal the sick.