The Villages - June 2017 - 18

Health

V i l l a g e s H e a lt H p r o V i d e r s
answer tHe question:

Why Is Preventive Health
Care So Important?
Dr. Brooks Betts,
Colony Care Center

Dr. Sweny Gulati,
Creekside Care Center

I view preventive care as being
proactive rather than reactive
to health care concerns. As a
physician, I attempt to teach
patients how to prevent illness
by leading healthy lifestyles
and treating risks factors early,
prior to the development of more significant illness.
This also involves making sure patients are up to date
in their immunizations and disease screenings. Early
prevention is the key to avoiding many illnesses, costly
and debilitating medical care and hospital stays.

If you are always chasing an
illness after it has occurred, it's
worse for the patient because
they have to take medications
that all have side effects. They
don't feel like they can live the
same quality of life they could
before. There are things that could have been prevented
if they had known that they needed to do certain things
like diet and exercise. It's too late when you have the
flu to be told, "You should have taken your flu shot a
few months ago." Nobody wants to be in the hospital.
And if you can make that happen by controlling their
blood pressure so they don't have kidney disease, by
controlling their diabetes so they don't have a heart
attack, I think everybody would prefer that.

Dr. Robert Reilly,
medical director,
Creekside Care Center
When you look at patients' care
goals, all of them are going to
say, "I just want to live a healthy
life." Most will say that it's not
about how many years they live.
It's about how many good years
they live. Most of them would take a lot of good years
and maybe their life expectancy to be a little bit shorter
than many years of severe illness where they can't enjoy
life. That's exactly the goal of doctors who practice good
preventive care. If we can work together in a model based
on prevention rather than treatment, in the long run,
you're going to get to that goal, which is to have good
quality of life for as many years as we can give it to you.

18

JUNE 2017

everythingpossible/iStock/Thinkstock

Co m p i l e d B y l a r r y d. C r o o m



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