I really enjoyed watching the videos this week and reading through all the articles. I believe that now I have a better understanding as to why we only focus on sedentary lifestyle and diet when dealing with obesity as opposed to looking at other was to decrease exposure. One of the videos discussed that many times we are solely focused on diet and sedentary lifestyle because physicians feel like this is something they can truly fix or help with. They do not like to ask the hard questions such as what kind of environment they live, play, or work in because regardless of the answer, they don’t feel confident that they can change any of those factors. The video I liked most had a story about a lady who suffered from migraines and had multiple ER visits. Finally, the medical assistant at her PCP’s office asked her about her living environment and found that there was mold, and a few other hazards. After connecting her with the right resources and getting those things fixed, her symptoms also went away. As a society, we tend to focus on quick fixes, such as giving medications. However, we forget to assess the entire environment. We don’t feel like we have the adequate resources to help people, however, as public health workers, we need to assess the entire situation.
Vanessa,
ReplyDeleteThank you for speaking about the "quick fixes". Quick fixes are a huge part of health care right now and its great to know that you and young health professionals like yourself are trying something different. My mom is a nurse and she talks about this all the time. She speaks mainly about how PCPS are given such short times with patients and how that affects their access to care, etc. Most of the A lot of what she describes is both patient and nursing frustration. Hopefully we can start looking at long term changes instead of quick fixes.
Great that you touched on asking the hard questions. I think that is something everyone needs to start doing. On the other side of the coin, people who are being asked these questions need to learn how to answer these questions without feeling attacked or offended. I guess that falls on how we, as future health care providers, ask these questions and assure our clients that their answers will allow us to help them even more.
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