“Prevention is better than cure”. Out of a country’s health budget, a large proportion should be diverted from treatment to spending on health education and preventative measures. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement?
While a school of thought firmly believes that the majority of public spending should be creating awareness about circumventing illnesses rather than combating them. I will delve into this matter profoundly even though I feel this should be a joint responsibility.
An army of people proposes that traditionally, people have had at least to take a week off from their respective workplace in order to ensure their speedy recovery from the wellness demanding an expensive healthcare intervention; ranging from diagnosis to their treatment. Besides this, they will not be able to contribute towards economic productivity. However, if citizens know about taking precautions they will be able to sustain their well-being, and not only it will help in saving public money but also pay taxes by working leading to lesser loss of economy and better public health index.
Nevertheless, despite this proposal presenting certain benefits, it seems short-sided. One cannot ignore the impact of stressful lifestyles people are living in the contemporary times and even by following healthy regimes their healthy lifestyle is affected by overwork and lack of time to focus on their health and also their diet; consequently, they are being affected by lifestyle diseases like diabetes-2 and hypertension which needs necessary medical intervention. Likewise, aged people cannot predict the autonomous diseases they will be inflicted with and will require compulsory medicinal and treatment support. For example: disorders like arthritis, weak vision, lack of mobility and so on, affect everybody and only medicines can provide relief from such conditions.
In hindsight, undeniably, creating awareness about staying away from disease and ailments can potentially help society, but laying more emphasis on it instead of treatments can prove to be disastrous. Thus, I feel that both the preventive and combat methods should be prioritized.