Prevention is better than treatment

Since our childhood we have been taught this mantra that "prevention is better than cure". Prevention is better than cure when it improves your healthiness. It is not better than cure if it reduces your healthiness - because it leads to disease. Prevention is not actually better than cure if you are already sick. A huge percentage of North Americans already have one disease. A significant percentage already have two or more diseases.

Unfortunately, cured is not defined for most diseases. Cured is defined for a few infectious diseases. Cured is not defined for any non-infectious diseases. Why is cured not defined? Because cures for non-infectious diseases come from healthiness, not from medicines.

Because cured is not defined for most diseases clearly, and because we focus our attention on prevention, instead of learning to define cured, we fail to cure many diseases. As we fail to cure many diseases, people accumulate diseases, and over time. A huge percentage of people have at least one disease, and a large number of people have more than one disease.

Many diseases have multiple causes. If a patient has a disease like depression, or diabetes, or arthritis, with a single cause - it is relatively easy to cure by addressing the cause. But when we focus all of our attention on prevention, patients can also accumulate causes for their diseases. We often get stuck on preventatives and keep using them even when they are no longer necessary, or no longer effective.

Preventatives like sunscreen come with a huge marketing plan - and when science demonstrates that they can create more risk than benefit - it is hard to get away from them, because of the mantra “prevention is better than cure”. A common situation in which prevention is less effective is when the risk of an event is low. It does not make sense to expend much money and effort to prevention something that will almost certainly not occur.

And low prevalence often bedevils proposals to screen for rare diseases. Usually, there is enough error in the screening test that you end up with more false positives than true positives. If the false positives are then treated (unnecessarily), and treatment has significant risks and costs, then it can be better not to be screened in the first place. Screening for prostate cancer appears to be in this category for most men.

Therefore, when there is no cure, screening is an obvious waste of time. This is the situation right now for asymptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease. Even screening for diabetes, and diabetes prevention are borderline. Studies prove that you can delay diabetes with diet and exercise, but very few people actually succeed at doing so; and high blood sugar is easy to control with very inexpensive drugs after the diagnosis.

Frequent breast cancer screening is also a waste of time and money (and anxiety) for many women. The types of cancers that will kill you grow so quickly that they are rarely detected in time even with screening every year. And the types that are detected early are usually so slow-growing that less frequent testing will find them in plenty of time. The same is true of cervical cancer screening.

Of course the area of medicine in which screening and prevention are most effective is cardiovascular disease—heart attack, stroke, and related conditions. CVD accounts for about half of all mortality. Many actions are proven to prevent it, including blood pressure drugs, statin drugs, aspirin, a healthier diet, a couple of alcoholic drinks per day, avoiding NSAIDs, possibly daily exercise, and most important, stopping smoking. CVD rates have been declining in the USA for many years thanks to prevention (and also thanks to more effective treatment).

Please note that taking medicines can be a major form of prevention. In fact, medicines are often the most effective prevention actions because they are proven by randomized trials to work (assuming they are, that is) and most people can swallow a pill every day even if they cannot manage to change their diet or their level of activity.

And also note that prevention is often more risk-effective and cost-effective after a person has acquired a disease, because the risk of bad events his higher for them, and there is little or less uncertainty about whether they will get these bad events if there is no prevention. This is called secondary prevention. A good example is a non-fatal heart attack, or a test or symptom that shows definite heart disease. In these situations, the risk of another heart attach is much higher than average, so the benefit of preventive action is much greater, too.

It is meaningless to lock the stable after horses have left. Prevention implies to stop doing something wrong and cure means to find a solution when something undesirable has already happened. Prevention is a shield which saves mankind from disasters and destruction. Steps taken with little anticipation and understanding can cure us from unfortunate results.

Of course humans have the sense to distinguish the right and wrong, the good and bad, the safe and danger. He can judge the situation before the situations engulf him. Precautions halts the evil before it overpowers him whereas cure is a solution to the risk factor which has already engulfed him. Hence prevention is better than cure.

A well and advanced plan can avoid a disastrous outcome. Planning is necessary everywhere whether it is to study, to work, to get a job, to run a business or even to lose weight. Everything should go systematically. Regular vaccination help children to lead a healthy and happy life and eradicate some incurable diseases like polio, measles and tetanus.

Healthy diet and regular exercise prevent the risk of some cardio vascular diseases, blood pressure or diabetes. AIDS is the most terrifying disease. Though it is not curable, it can be prevented with proper precautions. Dams save villages from heavy flood or flow of water. Precaution of weather always help people save their lives. In a nutshell, to prevent one has to be alert enough to judge any situation and act wisely. It leads a healthy and joyous life. Cheers!