Americans are starting to see the doctor again, but more often for cosmetic procedures, such as Botox treatments, rather than cancer screening and other potentially life-saving preventive care.
Imagine yourself as an 80 year old.
Seriously. You really can’t. You don’t know how your eyes will function, how slow you’ll be walking. How wrinkly your skin will be. How sharp or slow your mind will be.
Now imagine yourself with diabetes. You have no idea what it feels like. You have no idea how threatened you’ll feel when you first get the diagnosis.
It’s the difference between empathy and experience.
This is the problem with prevention. We can’t imagine ourself old and/or sick. We can only see ourselves and feel our “health” today. We can surely remember what it was like to have pneumonia or a broken leg. But we get over that and return back to normal. When you get old or you get diabetes, there is no going back to normal. That is your normal.
So it just makes sense that we won’t invest time and money in preventing problems we can’t imagine we’ll ever have.
Botox gives us a solution today. And because doctors don’t get paid for prevention, they’re more than happy to take your money to make you look young again– in fact that’s how they’re maintaining salaries in this age of diminishing reimbursement.