Here is an excerpt from an interview with a retired medical and wellness doctor…..
Question: In recent years what have been the most important trends in health and wellness?
Answer: I suppose the “easy” answer is to mention how wellness is a personal journey and necessarily different for each of us, and so no one answer can be offered. And that is true but not really what you’d getting at so let me try to be more direct in answering…..
I think we’d have to look pre-Covid and post-Covid. Before the pandemic the major health and wellness issues were quite well understood. If we look at the western or developed world (in the developing world we would see a different set of priorities driven by poverty and more) we’d have seen lifestyle and lifestyle-driven diseases like diabetes, heart disease and stroke as major concerns. Poor nutrition (excess mainly), sedentary living, and urbanisation all play a role here. Stress and life balance have emerged as major concerns too, over recent decades. Cancer is ever a dread disease. The scourge of HIV has been managed very well in recent times but remains a significant issue in some regions like Southern Africa.
And all of these matters remain relevant today, but post-Covid and post-lockdown we do see some shifts in wellness priorities. There is probably an increased general awareness of health and wellness although it is difficult to discern if this is making real measurable changes in behaviour – it may well be that Covid demonstrated the ill-effects of obesity very tragically but it does not seem to have created a meaningful change in behaviour (eating less). There is certainly more concern around hygiene (hand washing is certainly one lesson well worth remembering). Working from home and related life-balance issues (city vs. rural living, etc.) have become more front-of-mind for many.
One aspect worth mentioning is that the public in general have lost some trust. In politicians certainly. But also in the medical profession broadly, including “big-pharma” but also health authorities and researchers. There are real concerns that proper science – at its core always self-questioning – may have been side-lined in favour of expediency, urgency, rush, and even, yes, panic. This may be understandable (in fairness nobody really saw this coming and nobody really knew what to do) to a point, in varying degrees (time will tell, eventually). For some it is evidence of a global conspiracy or devious plot of some sort, although this seems a stretch to most. But that trust has been eroded, seems clear already. This will almost certainly have major implications for health and health policy going forwards. But that starts to get beyond what I can understand or explain, for sure!
Health economics is perhaps the other major concern we see these days. I refer to all levels here: from international policies, national health services, state funded healthcare, private healthcare, healthcare insurance, profit-making-huge-corporates, professionals and service providers, hospitals, and more. The reality all over the world is that optimal healthcare, really optimal healthcare, is only available to the wealthy. The details vary (considerably) but this is broadly true. This reality, and this imbalance, is a great concern for us all. The reality is that modern healthcare is extremely powerful but also extremely expensive. Idealists see optimal healthcare as a universal human right and this seems admirable indeed. But also unaffordable short of some economic system not yet known to humankind. This quandary troubles us all.
In both these matters (public trust and health economics) it seems, to me, that the general public are smarter than “leaders” appreciate. I think the public can handle the truth better than leaders think. The world would have coped with something like “……we are not sure that we can stop an airborne virus and so we must face our limitations honestly and stick with actual evidence-based science….it may be that there is not a huge ammount that can sensibly be done, unfortunately…..”, rather well, actually. Similarly, saying something like ”Decent healthcare is something we want everyone to have. But beyond a certain level it is just not affordable in our nation, and so we must compromise a bit……” would be appreciated, rather a lot.
If we could get back to the true nature of science, and follow that, and if we could face the tough health economics questions more brutally honestly, we could really make even more progress than we have to date. The world’s people are arguably more well than ever. But they could be well-er.
Author: Dr Colin Burns, retired medical practitioner and wellness coach
