In healthcare it's "prevention".
Remember last week. "Maintaining order rather than correcting disorder is the ultimate principle of wisdom. To cure disease after it has appeared is like digging a well when one feels thirsty, or forging weapons after the war has already began." – Nei Jing (2nd Century BC)
You know this one.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” - Benjamin Franklin
It sounds so logical and great, so why is it so "hard". Remember last week we talked about
easy / hard and hard / easy.
Easy is well, EASY. It's easy, when you are starving and you pass by a fast food place to stop and get something. It's harder to wait til you get home and then spend time making something. If a tumor grew on your throat after one trip through the drive-thru, it would be pretty easy to avoid it again.
Sadly, that doesn't happen.
This is where you need access to the logical and abstract parts of your brain. You'd think men would do pretty well understanding these concepts, but women trump men by about 7 years in life span because they actively do more prevention.
You're probably thinking that "prevention" isn't that dirty of a word. Prevention is almost always trumped by "early detection". I'm reading the Costco magazine (Oct. 2014) right now and on page 43 is an article for Breast cancer awareness month coming up.
"Forty thousand women will die from breast cancer in 2014"
-Dr. Altman, about the same as last year
"Early detection of breast cancer is vital"
"The goal of screening exams for early breast cancer detection is to find cancers before they start to cause symptoms."
The hard reality is that breast cancer can easily take 20 years to grow large enough to detect with self exams or mammography.
Now, the goal of early- detection is very noble and worthy of time, money and effort, but....what did Ben Franklin say? The money you raise by wearing pink goes to "fight against the disease with research". The money is funneled into drug research and not prevention. What did Ben say?
I just pulled a $100 bill out, who is important enough to have his face on it? What did Ben say?
Remember we talked about the WORLD PLAN last week. if you don't have a plan and actions to be healthy, you are on the world plan. This is the plan promoted by main stream media, and mainstream heathcare.
I used to work in the SAME complex as the Susan G. Komen foundation in Salt Lake (50 feet and 1 stairway away) . Every woman has heard of this foundation. I walked in and personally invited the director to a class I was doing on breast cancer prevention. I thought "wow, these people can make a difference". I even volunteered to do the class in their office. I told these ladies I was even using their website in my class. They provide a very, very small amount of info on prevention. They at least have some. My class just went much deeper. The flat out told me, "that's not our focus". I was totally shocked.
Hey, what did that idiot on the hundred dollar bill say?
If you are ready to do something, buy this book right now.
The breast cancer stats are about the same every year, except one. It was the year after women stopped taking their hormone medications, ie...the huge nurses study. If you understand prevention, real prevention, you can teach your girls, your friends, and you can make a much larger dent in breast cancer awareness month.
My goal is to give you choices you didn't know you had, to give you a hope that your future can be brighter than the WORLD PLAN, and to make you aware of new ideas. The responsibility to take control of your health is ultimately yours. Remember, if you don't have a plan, the world has one for you.
The next time you pull a Franklin out of your wallet I hope you hear this,
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”