The report touted medicine's changing mission of disease prevention, requiring that the pharmaceutical industry develop drugs that help prevent or delay disease rather than just treating the end results. This signals a critical shift regarding the future focus of research money and marketing. For years, we chiropractors have been saying that the prevention of injury and disease is the surest method to achieve and maintain good health at any age. Each year, greater numbers of Americans are looking to nontraditional providers for their health care needs. Since this funding had to come from the designated health care pie, in effect, medical funding was reduced by these same figures.
Prevention is the brother of wellness.
For much of its history, geriatric population studies dealt strictly with disease. Shifting the focus to prevention allows millions of government research dollars to become available to study the 95 percent of the geriatric population who still live in the community. Here researchers are finding an even more dramatic distinction between age and disease as they uncover the characteristics, habits and lifestyle patterns of healthy, older adults. These elders chose wellness and health decades ago. Wellness is a powerful concept.