Prevention in family services : approaches to family wellness / edited by David R. Mace.

Date:
[1983], ©1983
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Prevention in family services : approaches to family wellness / edited by David R. Mace. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    [16] WHAT THIS ROOK IS ABOUT possible to cut down the flow of pathology which is making such heavy demands in terms of remedial services, by supplementing these services beforehand with preventive services? As one college counselor expressed it: I've spent the last ten years fishing troubled youngsters out of the river. Now I'm beginning to ask why they got into the river in the first place, and whether something might be done at the other end. The logic behind this statement is clear and convincing. Consider two of our major remedial services—one very old, the other rela¬ tively new. First, consider the field of medicine. According to Charles Dull, who represents a major life insurance company ( the AID Associa¬ tion for Lutherans), over 96% of health care costs in the United States today are spent for diagnosis and treatment and less than 4% for prevention. This was dramatized in a report in the New England Journal of Medicine (summarized in the September 1980 issue of Reader's Digest, page 9) that described a survey of 2.238 patients who, in the course of a year, were treated by six Boston hospitals. It was found that 1 3% of these patients taxed the hospitals' resources as much as the remaining 87%. Since only 10% of Americans enter a hospital in the course of any given year, this suggests that half of our total hospi¬ tal resources are being consumed by 1.3% of the population. What was significant was that these particular patients proved to have high incidences of smoking, drinking, and overeating—all considered bad habits from a health point of view, and all of which are preventable. A similar situation was described by the Surgeon General in his 1979 report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention: Perhaps as much as half of U.S. mortality in 1979 was due to unhealthy behavior or life-styles, 20% to environmental factors, 20% to human biological factors, and only 10% to inadequacies in health care. These facts illustrate how far medicine will have to travel in order to develop effective preventive services. Alex Comfort has declared that the United States has a sickness industry, not a health service {Psychology Today, December 1981, page 112). Many physicians are aware of this and are eager to do more in the the area of prevention. Second, consider the field of mental health. It will be sufficient to quote George W. Albee, an authority in the field, from a lecture at the University of Minnesota on May 21, 1980: