Prevention

The setting up of the Integrative Health Trust and the Faculty of Integrative Medicine is driven by the urgent need for change in the health status of the people of Britain which we believe will not happen fast enough through planned NHS and public health initiatives alone.

Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation and the Health and Safety Executive report that in the UK in 2008:
• Every two minutes someone is diagnosed with cancer in the UK.
• One in three people will have cancer in their lifetime
• This rate is set to treble by 2025, according to the Cancer 2025 Expert Group chaired by Professor Karol Sikora.
• One in two will develop and die from arterial heart disease
• One in three people is alcohol or drug dependent, and the rise of binge drinking in the young is leading to an unprecedented rise in liver failure in young women.
• One in four people experiences clinical depression.
• One in three people lives alone, susceptible to isolation and depression.
• One in three adults smokes and one in ten children smokes
• One in two marriages ends in divorce
• One in two people is overweight and one in five obese; this rate is rising rapidly, causing multiple preventable health problems such as diabetes, arthritis and depression.

All of this adds up to an immense amount of human suffering and a huge and mounting cost to all tax payers from preventable lifestyle-related illness caused by negative health-defining behaviour which could be changed with the right kind of support, guidance and motivation.

To add to the immense and costly disease burden being generated by Western lifestyle-related disease, a steadily ageing population and spiralling healthcare costs caused by new ‘medical breakthrough drugs and technologies’ mean that we are currently on a financial collision course. Funding for the NHS rose from over £55bn in 2002/2003 to nearly £90bn in 2007/2008, an increase of 7.2% a year in real terms. Meanwhile spending on prevention of illness and health promotion in 2002 was £250m – equivalent to the amount the NHS spent in a day and a half!

Meanwhile the health insurers are looking for ways to limit their liability in a climate where potentially all of their customers will be facing either cancer or heart disease. One company has already started a policy called ‘My Cancer Drugs’ so that people can start to pay now for the top up fees they may have to pay for cancer treatments that the NHS can no longer afford to fund…and yet more than 65% of these illnesses are preventable through the personal and collective lifestyle choices that we make!

The big question then is why does our current health system fail to address the cause of the problem rather than just the symptoms, and why are we drifting passively into an international health crisis which is just as threatening to us as global warming or the credit crunch is to our survival?

Historically we have been encouraged to believe the state of our health is not within our control, that illness is random and that if our health deteriorates that the health service or our doctor will be able to fix us. (Imagine then the shock of those diagnosed with cancer to discover that only three out of over 200 cancers are curable with medical treatment). Thus many people remain in a passive relationship to their health, becoming ‘accidents waiting to happen’.

The 2008 Darzi NHS review states clearly that the government must invest in the prevention of illness and promotion of health, but there is little evidence that NHS personnel have the skills or knowledge to do this. Currently, most medical and nursing training involves only a minute component relating to the role of the patient in the generation and maintenance of their health and well-being. Neither are today’s doctors and nurses necessarily trained in the communication skills required to help patients make sense of the crisis of illness and transform this into a genuine opportunity for constructive reappraisal of their relationship to their health and lifestyle.

There is an urgent need for the learning that has been gained by those practising first class Integrative Medicine and proactive preventive healthcare to be taught to doctors and nurses within the NHS for the widest possible public benefit.