FIn the face of the human tragedies and catastrophic expenditures resulting from the relentless increase in the prevalence of cancer and other chronic diseases, it is clear that our health care system has reached its limits, both in terms of its effectiveness and its funding. It seems that the time has come to give prevention the central place that common sense has always wanted it to have in our health system.
In the realm of good intentions and political rhetoric, prevention must now occupy the place it always should have: the pillar of our health policy. We no longer have the means to do otherwise! The government has raised health prevention to the level of a national priority. Parliament and health institutions have made this issue the focus of their work priorities and reform projects.
However, despite the great advances in diagnostics and digital technologies, and because they combine heterogeneous factors such as education, diet, hygiene, lifestyles, environment, or even geographical location, health prevention remains more complex in terms of organization and implementation than system health care.
The standard system does not have a preventive approach
Therefore, the task is difficult. In the context of declining medical demographics and difficulties in meeting demand for care in many areas, it even seems insurmountable. Our conception of progress from the Enlightenment has favored an overly mechanistic view of the human being, ousting the patient from clinical practice and replacing him with the study of his organs, then his cells and now his genes.
The modern organization of medicine is based on statistics (Evidence-based medicine) and the medical procedure. The latter is codified in protocols issued by scientific societies, and then in nomenclature determined by health insurance. This standardized approach “manages” the disease based on the interpretation of symptoms by isolating them from the context of their occurrence, ignoring the specificity of each individual. We are no longer treating the man… but the disease.
Of course, this normative system is not fully compatible with a preventive approach that requires a view of human beings in their totality, their uniqueness and their environment, in order to identify and act preventively on risk factors that contribute to a disease or accident. To be effective, medicine can no longer resolve itself into simple, one-time therapeutic acts divorced from the complex reality of the patient. This is especially so since health workers are the first to want to find time to practice a profession that most of them have chosen best.
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