by Darwin Hale
The American healthcare industry is a battlefield where 250,000 Americans die annually from medical errors and $3.3 trillion is spent, of which, almost one-quarter is wasted.
Whether you realize it or not, you’ll eventually be pulled into combat.
When that time comes, you don’t want to lose the fight before it’s even fought. There are enemies looking to destroy you, and if you’re not prepared, they can rob you of your ability to handle health complications when they inevitably arise.
Life expectancy for Americans is 79 years. That’s just an average, though.
Depending on where you live, that average can drop to 67 years or be as high as 87 years – a variance of two decades! Geography might seem like the driving force here, but our choices are much more impactful in determining how long we live.
Enemies like cancer and heart disease are out to get us, but so are the enemies we invite in, like smoking and obesity, that are the underlying causes of diseases like diabetes, which was the seventh leading cause of death for Americans.
A lack of exercise also invites danger later in life, when weaker legs and hips can cause falls that lead to more serious medical conditions and even depression.
The third leading cause of death – medical errors – is also impacted by our choices.
Medical errors don’t just mean the doctor cut the wrong thing. It’s often the result of a fragmented system that results in missing things that we could have caught.
People don’t help things, though, when they don’t get the type of preventative care that could’ve saved their lives because they didn’t know they needed it.
There is also the issue of non-compliant behavior, when patients don’t do what their doctor told them to do, or don’t take care of themselves in the first place.
We’re already battling diseases. We shouldn’t be battling ourselves as well.
How to Be Prepared for the Fight
To be able to fight for your health, you first need to understand where you’re vulnerable. Whether due to genetics or your choices, where are your defenses the weakest?
To borrow a military term, you want to run a vulnerability assessment on your health to determine the most likely thing that is going to happen if you’re vulnerable.
When defending a base, for example, we often thought about how we would attack the base, thereby exposing weaknesses using another point of view.
Let’s say you run a vulnerability assessment and realize that you’re not walking as steady as you once did. Knowing that vulnerability, you can assume that falling and injuring yourself is a likely outcome – and one that you want to avoid.
Here’s the good news: slips and falls are largely preventable.
If you’re not walking steadily, you might just need some physical therapy. You could also do some strength conditioning and balance work to help you walk better.
This is low-hanging fruit, something that everybody sees but not enough people do anything about. It’s obvious, inexpensive, and uncomplicated.
Each person should conduct their own vulnerability assessment to find weak points. Is it your diet? Mobility? Are there steps you should take to combat your genetics?
It’s necessary to think about how you might be attacked and create a defensive plan.
Pay Attention to the Signs Your Body Gives You
In the military, we conducted vulnerability assessments because we knew that terrorists would be looking for weaknesses they could exploit to do us harm.
Our job was to make sure they didn’t find any weaknesses.
Diseases work the same way, and when they’re looking to gain a foothold in our body, often they’ll leave signs that can offer us clues if we’re paying attention.
If we were in a tower protecting a base and saw the same car come up three times in a month and take photographs, we took that as an indicator something was about to happen. Indicators are clues, and you want to be aware of those clues.
With your body, these clues can be found in metrics like cholesterol or blood pressure. If you unintentionally lose a lot of weight, that’s cluing you in to a large issue.
By paying attention, you can defeat these enemies before the battle even begins.
With cancer, for example, scientists are finding that there are clues within your body regarding the predisposition or formation of cancer long before it happens.
The most obvious clue is for colon cancer. Doctors can conduct a colonoscopy and see by the shape and the size of a polyp if it is eventually going to turn into cancer. If it is, they remove it. The same principle applies for breast cancer screenings.
I once had to go through strenuous rehab for my back and shoulder pain.
I now realize that if I’d done many of those rehab exercises in advance, I probably could have avoided the therapy and rehab altogether, but I didn’t know to do them. As my mom used to say, “a stitch in time saves nine.”
Don’t make the same kind of mistake. Now is your chance to get ahead of things.
Assess your risk and vulnerability, formulate a plan to mitigate those things, get informed, determine your course of action, and use wellness to fight the enemy.
You don’t have to lose the battle for your health before it’s even fought.
(Darwin Hale is the CEO of Advocate Health Advisors and the author of Need To Know: How to Arm Yourself and Survive on the Healthcare Battlefield, a no-nonsense guide to navigating the American healthcare system.)
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