We Know What’s Right, but It’s Hard

In perusing various blogs, I came across Matthew Gibson, MD’s blog and this really compelling article titled, “It’s So Easy, and Yet…” Here’s one especially poignant section:

What I see day in and day out is complications of simple, easy to manage problems like diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, etc. These are things that we KNOW how to treat. We know how to prevent complications. And yet, I just had a man last week who required half of his foot to be amputated as a complication of untreated diabetes. I had a woman this week who came in seeing snakes on people’s clothing, because her blood pressure was so high it was affecting her mind. Last month, I saw a man who had large amounts of yeast growing in his mouth and groin because his blood sugar (and thus urinary sugar) was so high.

This morning, I’m caring for a truly pleasant gentleman with COPD (bad chronic lung disease usually caused by smoking). He hasn’t smoked in the last 15 years, but he smoked quite heavily before that. Even though he’s been doing things all right as far as his lungs are concerned for the last 15 years, he has to live with the consequences of his actions prior to that. For the last several days, I’ve seen him decompensate and gasp for air, feeling like he’s drowning, because he can’t get the air to move through his lungs like he should. How did this kind old man get to this point?

At the core of his comments is the idea of how do we motivate ourselves to do something we know we should be doing. This is a really hard question to answer and something we probably will never solve completely. However, I think there’s plenty of room to improve even if we never become perfect at it.

Over on Smart Phone Healthcare we’ve spent a lot of time reviewing various mobile health applications. I’d say that the large majority of mHealth applications are about trying to help solve this problem. Plus, I think the mobile device connected with good data about ourselves is one method that will help us be healthier.

Related to this idea, is what I’ve called treating healthy patients. This is a concept that won’t leave me since I think it will be a fundamental part of the future of healthcare. I believe we’re on the brink of a series of devices and technology that will help us monitor our bodies in such a way that we can identify sickness within us before we feel sick. This information won’t make everyone change their behaviors, but it will help many.

We’re in the very early stages of monitoring our bodies and connecting all that data with action. However, it’s exciting to see that now many of these things are possible thanks to powerful computing and a new generation of devices.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

Categories