Public Health and Citizens, Truly United

There are just two problems with the prevailing conception of "public health" -- the public, and health. Neither means what we think it means. For starters, there is no public. The public is an anonymous mass, a statistical conception, nameless, faceless, unknowable, and unlovable. I have made the case before that laboring under this crippling fiction, the potential good that all things "public health" might do is much forestalled. We talk, for instance, about the genuine potential to eliminate up to 80 percent of the total global burden of chronic disease -- heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, dementia -- but somehow evoke a yawn, rather than shock, awe, and eager passion. We might fix this by putting faces on public health more reliably, demonstrating vividly the skin we all have in the game. That, however, is a topic for other columns. Health is not what happens in hospitals. I am among the growing number of "health care" professionals who sing out at every opportunity that we do not have a "health care system," we have a disease care system. My esteemed colleague and good friend, Dr. Richard Carmona, 17th Surgeon General of the United States, said the same -- although he said "sick" rather than "disease" -- at a podium we shared last week. This may seem a minor matter of terminology, but it is far graver than that, if not even terminal to the pursuit of better medical destinies. We invest fortunes in new ways to treat diseases that never need to happen, and by cal...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news