Few recent stories summarize our society’s declining health status more strikingly than this one, a sobering report from researchers who calculated from health insurance records that, for the first time, more than half of insured American adults take medications on an ongoing basis for chronic diseases.
Amidst a host of disturbing statistics, these stand out:
Medication use for chronic problems was seen in all demographic groups:
- Almost two-thirds of women 20 and older.
- One in four children and teenagers.
- 52 percent of adult men.
- Three out of four people 65 or older.
Among seniors, 28 percent of women and nearly 22 percent of men take five or more medicines regularly.
In the United States, two quite divergent trends are occurring simultaneously. The first is the one documented in the medication use study: rising levels of chronic disease accompanied by long-term use of prescription medications. The other trend, the hopeful one, is that increasing numbers of Americans are doing more to prevent illness through smoking cessation, healthier eating and regular exercise.
Increased levels of chronic disease (especially diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and cancer), combined with an ever-accelerating and breathtakingly expensive high-technology medical sector, are creating an unsustainable trend line. Move the diabetes and cardiovascular disease projections 20 years forward, and the health care system will suffer a financial meltdown. This, in addition the very real human suffering that dry statistics can never fully convey.
Though it is far more easily said than done, prevention is the only true solution.
