Opinion: Let’s encourage — and fund — disease prevention in Canada

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Posted By: jasabacklink June 11, 2024

There is much concern about the doctor shortage. Indeed, some 6 million Canadians have no family doctor at all. Many medical caregivers are leaving the profession to escape the frustration, the excessive paperwork and the overwork. Hospital emergency wards are typically above capacity. Our elderly face difficult living conditions and are typically forced to leave their homes for a much less desirable, institutional option.

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I appreciate the concerns expressed by those involved with the medical system; however, something is missing. We spend nearly all the money and effort in the system on sickness treatment. We spend next to nothing on sickness prevention and health promotion.

Instead, we sometimes create the very conditions that can make us sick:

  • making poor dietary choices (eating fast foods, for example);
  • ignoring healthy lifestyles and exercise;
  • living within unhealthy environments (air pollution, pesticides, chemicals, overcrowding, plastics, electronics, etc.)

Here’s a perfect example of a glaring contradiction in our health system. On its website, Health Canada promotes a diet mostly based on plant foods. It tells us: “Eat plenty of vegetables and fruits” and “limit highly processed foods.” Yet we see ads on CBC, our public broadcaster, for various fast-food outlets featuring the very processed foods we are told to avoid.

Too often, more drugs, surgeries and vaccines are seen as our best protection and our only hope. Is it enough to add more medical professionals, more drugs and more sickness treatments as our best answer to current and future health concerns?

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Here’s something we can do: Let’s try to become healthier.

Let’s develop and institute a high-profile “National Disease Prevention Strategy” with easily accessible public information that examines the varied elements that cause disease and the available means to personally and institutionally prevent them and promote better health. And let’s create a new HRA (health risk assessment) tool that all Canadians can use to:

  • assess their current health status (diets, lifestyles, pre-existing conditions, etc.);
  • recommend actions to improve;
  • track progress and revise accordingly.

This would require building on those HRAs that already exist here and in other countries. One developed at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute could be used as a model (projectbiglife.ca). (Using that calculator, I’ve got a better than 50/50 chance of living past 94.)

Another essential component should be to identify and categorize all existing man-made and natural toxic substances in our environment. And what about the health effects of all the latest electronic and wireless technology? Let’s find out how safe it is.

A third component could be to teach and encourage Canadians, especially our young, to live healthier lives. Promote healthy diets and lifestyles. Fully educate medical caregivers in the prevention of disease and make it a billable element of our  government health insurance plans, to ensure that preventing disease and promoting healthy lifestyles become priorities.

These recommendations are only the start of what we must do. Just adding more resources to our current health system as it is may not be the best approach. Let’s first get healthier.

Jake Cole is former environment director for the Canadian Coast Guard and a volunteer with Friends of the Earth Canada.

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