Someone says the following: “Lifestyle may be the most important determinant of health status, but changing lifestyles may not be the least costly way to improve population health status.” Explain the circumstances under which this opinion could be true. Is it likely to be true in reality?
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I would agree with the sentiment. As a wellness professional for over 30 years, I can tell you that effecting significant lifestyle change on a societal level is VERY difficult. It’s not just a matter of changing the behavior. It’s a matter of effecting permanent changes in the work, societal, personal, and family environment that are needed to support the desired changes (versus putting up obstacles to those changes).
Short of draconian legislation, i.e., MANDATING healthy behavior, how can you do that without expending significant amounts of money in advertising, education, counseling, administrative, and environmental changes? And if the changes become too heavy-handed, you have the rebound phenomenon of people who embrace the negative behaviors BECAUSE the positive behaviors are being pushed so hard.
So while changing lifestyles at the population level is certainly possible in theory, the application is much more complex… and likely costly.
A person can change from a healthy lifestyle to an unhealthy one (drinking, smoking, drug-use, promiscuity, poor diet, etc.). Such a change in lifestyle *could* cause long-run decreases in public health (car accidents, risky surgeries, clogging up emergency rooms if the unhealthy has no insurance, not paying medical bills, depriving emergency rooms the capability to purchase contemporary equipment at the expense of patients’ health)…