Prevention of Diabetes

"Diabetes care is a poster child for much of what’s wrong with our health-care system, which is good at handling acute crises but bad at preventing them." This is the opening quote of an article about employers in 10 U.S. cities agreeing to waive copays for employees’ diabetes meds, and to fund regular meetings between pharmacists and diabetic employees.

"A similar project in Asheville, N.C., a few years back suggested that employers save money in the long run, because improving diabetics’ health on the front end cuts the rate of expensive hospital procedures that are more common when diabetes is poorly controlled."

Maybe this is just a smart business move by pharamcists in response to recent slowdown of drug sales:
plenty of familiar reasons for the slowdown:

• “loss of exclusivity of branded medicines,
• fewer new product approvals,
• the leveling of year-over-year growth from the Medicare Part D program,
• and the impact of safety issues.”

I am thrilled anytime there is a move toward preventive (as opposed to preventative) care . However, in these studies funded by BigPharma, there is clearly no mention of another preventive measure that could be more cost-effective and more efficient in helping fight and control diabetes... a little thing we call exercise... and who is good at dealing with disease and exercise... a little group of people we call physical therapists...

In fact the American Diabetes Association webpage on how to prevent or delay diabetes mentions nutrition and exercise and yet nothing about drugs...

For the record: This is not intended to bash the pharmaceutical profession by any means, just sharing some candor on some interesting articles from today.

Here's another possibly positive story about health care with this great quote at the end:
“It begins with the assumptions that prescribing is one of the most useful and challenging things we doctors do, and that we doctors crave accessible, unbiased data about the drugs we prescribe. If war is too important to be left to the generals, then drug information is too important to be left primarily to the pharmaceutical industry.”

Speaking of exercise I am off to get a late night run in at my 24 hour gym... catch you cats on the flip side... go prevent something bad from happening to you!