At the risk of this blog becoming just a font of my own personal diatribes, here's another one. But first let me just say that having a new professional forum is a great opportunity to discuss and critique our perceptions of the field. I hope people come to post their own thoughts and opinions, or at least occasionally heckle the bejesus out of mine.
Sorry to beat a dead (language) cliche but now for Carpe Sanitas or Seize Health!
If life and happiness, both intrinsically health-related, are unalienable rights, I would like to see a little more "pursuit" in the methods of the American health care consumer.
That's why I'm here to deliver an invective on why the concept of "health care delivery" is utterly deplorable. It seems to imply that if you just wait long enough, health care will come to you. Just wait right there on the couch... "It's not delivery. It's diabetes."
And to be honest, the way our system is currently arranged, that's not far from the truth. Wait. And it comes. Help arrives in the form of an ambulance on the fast track to reactionary, emergency care. The problem is long established before any 'care' is given.
It's kind of like using a smoke alarm instead of an oven timer. Then as a society we bemoan how many burnt meals we've been having lately, how the price of smoke alarm batteries is skyrocketing, and how the alarms seem to malfunction more than they once did. (Let's not even mention the cost of providing smoke alarms to the uninsured. They don't even have a wall to hang it on.)
Physical Therapists have great potential to draw public attention to timers over alarms. Not only can we clearly explain how fast the clock is ticking and why, but often we can actually add time to the countdown.
Which brings me back to the latin, I am enthusiastic about the phrase "Carpe Sanitas" for 2 reasons. Number one, the 'seize health' message is relevant and timely as explained above. And number two, Sanitas could also be perceived or interpreted as "sanity". Frankly that's a useful double entendre. On the one hand you have the logical 'Seize Health' and on the other you have the more imploring 'Seize Sanity'.
The sane approach is the pursuit paradigm. Reactionary health care is bloated and unsustainable. It's begun to set off alarms and warnings of its own. Realizing this, PTs can and should pursue an aggressive oven timer agenda!
That's enough for one night from me. But anyone have thoughts on how to structure our agenda? Speak now or forever be subjected to more late night blogs from Ben.
to be continued...
ben
Just found the following paragraph in the Institute of Medicine's report "Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public"
ReplyDelete“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” a phrase taken directly from the Declaration of Independence, indicates the basic values identified by the founders of our nation. Of the three, life is the most fundamental as without it, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. Health, of course, is the underpinning of life and therefore, it is puzzling that there is so little general demand for an explicit public emphasis on nourishing health as a personal and social resource. Indeed, despite spending enough on “health care” to threaten our economy, our country is rife with chronic disease, is facing a growing epidemic of obesity and ill health, has a system of care that focuses on the treatment of episodes of disease rather than promoting health or coherently treating disease when it occurs, and there are 47 million Americans without health insurance.