Chronic Disease Management Quotes

Every citizen who stops smoking, or loses a few pounds, or starts managing his chronic disease with real diligence, is caulking a crack for the benefit of us all.

The world cannot continue to build larger health care systems where you just sit around and wait for people to get sick.

What Americans desperately need is a way to transition from the current system - which is fragmented and focuses on high-cost, high-tech interventions after illness strikes - to a modern system that delivers coordinated, high-touch, lower-cost, patient-centered care with an emphasis on primary care and prevention.

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once.

I learned the hard way how desperately primitive is the technology we have for monitoring the health of someone with a chronic illness.

Go back to the '30s, '40s, '50s, and it was the discovery of heroic interventions, the ability to cure people with penicillin or do an operation to stop disease that was what saved the day. Primary care physicians couldn't do all that much that really demonstrated a difference. The people who control and work with you to control your blood pressure, they're not rewarded for doing that or to be innovative about doing that. So, the result is half of Americans have uncontrolled high blood pressure, despite seeing clinicians.

You don't have a family doctor anymore like you did when you were a kid, who treated you throughout your life.

There are many types of preventive health care services that are covered, things like blood pressure medication, for example. And women are merely asking that their health be taken just as seriously.

I've said that the era of the inevitable closure of community hospitals is over because I want community hospitals increasingly to become community health hubs where you have the physios, some of the day cases, the GPs, mental health services and some of the charity-provided services like Aid UK.

If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.

There's an opportunity for the pharmacist to play a much greater role in health care, especially with what we have going on in this country with the shortage of primary-care physicians.

Most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There's a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer's, if you could avoid diabetes - those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn't favor them.

I am a type-2 diabetic, and they took me off medication simply because I ate right and exercised. Diabetes is not like a cancer, where you go in for chemo and radiation. You can change a lot through a basic changing of habits.

We have an opportunity to create a future where we are actually encouraging providers to keep people away from acute care, whenever possible.

In a successful health system, the proportion of per-capita health dollars used for home care, outpatient primary care, and preventive services should actually increase, not decrease, relative to those for acute hospital care.

Hospitals should be paid to keep patients out of the hospital, not for signing up more and more patients.

We are also in the process of defining how best to work together with food and other companies to address diet and physical activity factors in order to prevent chronic diseases.

AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.

One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year.

Part of my training was learning how to refer patients to cardiologists for heart problems, gastroenterologists for stomach issues, and rheumatologists for joint pain. Given that most physicians were trained this way, it's no wonder that the average Medicare patient has six doctors and is on five different medications.

You'd believe that a patient with hypertension, if you know you have hypertension or diabetes, you would take your drug every day. The compliance rate is more like 30% or 40%. Which means that 60% of patients don't take their drugs, and they actually go into these crises, end up in the hospital.

I am a physician specializing in nutritional interventions for chronic disease and a strong advocate of superior nutrition as the first line of attack to prevent and treat most chronic diseases.