As I sit in my hotel room across the street from the Mayo Clinic unable to drive home because of a raging blizzard, I’m grateful that my wife and I both got passing reports on our examinations performed at Mayo this week. We’re “healthy” with decent weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, x-rays, etc., and we were advised as to how often and when we should be vaccinated, and screened with procedures such as colonoscopy. What a relief! My hope is that the movement for health care reform that our country is now in the middle of will provide everyone with an opportunity to experience such medical care. Admittedly, the Mayo Clinic is special. But, as special and friendly and medically expert and up to date and efficient and famous as the Mayo Clinic is – what did it do to make me “healthy,” and, by extension, what did my “health insurance” that’ll help pay for my Mayo Clinic visit do to make me “healthy?” The answer, is, truthfully, not as much as one would think. Medical care, even the “best” medical care, doesn’t make us healthier. What it does is provide treatments for things we have no control over such as the need for surgery, treatment for diseases such as cancer, treatment after accidents, cataracts, Diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, to name only a few. Don’t get me wrong such treatments are very, very, important and everyone of us deserve to have access to them. However, health insurance (really “illness insurance”) even when it helps pay for a terrific organization like the Mayo Clinic cannot get us to do daily physical activity and eat less calories to keep our weight down which would truly make us “healthier” and prevent or delay those heart attacks, strokes, cancer, Diabetes, arthritis, sleep apnea,  and the myriad of  other lifestyle diseases. If we all took better care of ourselves, we wouldn’t  need as much “illness insurance” and that insurance would then provide medical and surgical treatments for problems we cannot prevent or treat ourselves. Again, “Your Weight Management = Your Health Management.” I’ll sign off now, it’s stopped snowing. We have to leave Rochester early tomorrow morning so we can be back in the office tomorrow afternoon. As always, I look forward to your comments. Also, what do you think of my recent post on “Diabetes?”

Tags: Dieting, Disease Prevention, Dr George S Motto MD, Health, Health Insurance, Lifestyle, Principles

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Insuring Our Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.