{"id":364788,"date":"2010-02-26T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-26T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sacbee.com\/2010\/02\/26\/2566132\/donnys-death-should-not-be-in.html#mi_rss=Opinion"},"modified":"2010-02-26T03:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-26T08:00:00","slug":"viewpoints-donnys-death-should-not-be-in-vain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/364788","title":{"rendered":"Viewpoints: Donny’s death should not be in vain"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tDr. Kay Judge<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Donny Phillips died last month. Quietly, desperately, sadly. <\/p>\n

Donny was a 35-year-old man, sick for most of his life, with a disease that health insurance does not acknowledge or reimburse for. At the end of his life, Donny could not get out of his bed. His body was too weak to hold him up, his lungs powerless to oxygenate him, his heart too worn out from overwork. He died without hope, a prisoner in his body, having spent the last six months in a hospital. <\/p>\n

He knew he was dying. He looked into my eyes and said, “Don’t let me die here, Doc. Everyone else has given up on me, don’t you give up on me too.” <\/p>\n

I was his new doctor. I, too, failed him in the end. <\/p>\n

Donny was big. Really big: 800 pounds. Semantics, blame and political correctness surround the issue of obesity. But, historically, the health care and insurance industry by and large have not paid for obesity to be effectively prevented. <\/p>\n

There was no early intervention for Donny growing up. There was no patient or community outreach. He ballooned gradually. He got sicker and sicker. There was no medically reimbursable program available to help him lose weight. He got fatter and fatter. <\/p>\n

He went from doctor to doctor and received standard-of-care medicine. He received medications, lab work and a series of hospitalizations for each new medical condition. But he never had his underlying cause – obesity – addressed. Why? Because that is what we Western-trained docs do – we treat the acute illness. It’s how we are taught and what we are reimbursed for. His overall care cost the system millions of dollars. Yet the few thousand dollars for weight management that might have prevented it all was not a covered expense. <\/p>\n

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former President Bill Clinton held a summit Wednesday on the state’s obesity crisis. It helped shine a spotlight on a national epidemic. <\/p>\n

Ten times more people are obese in the United States than in Japan. The three leading causes of death are heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Obesity is related to all of these. Excess weight and obesity affect an estimated 97 million Americans and are the second-leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Health insurance pays for the treatment of heart disease, diabetes and strokes, but not for obesity. <\/p>\n

We are in the midst of a passionate and politically charged national debate over health care. Donny had no political affiliation and had lived through multiple presidencies, but all existing health care coverage policies failed him in the treatment of his obesity. He paid for that with his life. <\/p>\n

It’s not that we are not spending on obesity. Obesity-related costs place a huge burden on the U.S. economy: In 2003 the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention estimated the direct health care costs attributable to obesity at $75 billion in 2003. <\/p>\n

But, ironically, we do not spend our money treating obesity. Instead, we pay for all the escalating and expensive conditions it causes. <\/p>\n

Obesity is not a treatable diagnosis, except bariatric surgery for severe obesity in medically approved cases. We are shutting the barn door after the horse has run out. <\/p>\n

What can we do about it? We can make the field of primary-care medicine palatable to graduating students, so we have a strong focus on and adequate reimbursement for preventive medicine in our country. We can empower health systems with the creation of and reimbursement for strong obesity prevention and treatment programs that are easily accessible within a health system. <\/p>\n

At this time, medical options for weight loss are pretty much limited to diet pills and supplement-based programs that patients pay for out of pocket. But hospitals and health systems could treat obesity as a continuum of disease, with early intervention, disease management including nutrition and behavioral and exercise counseling, multi-specialty intervention, patient tracking and quality-improvement incentives.<\/p>\n

We can create a “health care system,” instead of a “sick care system,” in which our resources are directed toward effective disease prevention (obesity) instead of a focus on sick patient management (all the diseases obesity causes). <\/p>\n

We are a fortunate nation, with access to the latest technology and medical advancements. It has been said we excel in “resurrection medicine” – we fix things once they are broken. Open-heart surgery, lung transplants, the latest and greatest pharmaceuticals – we are the best. <\/p>\n

But we don’t expend enough on efforts to prevent obesity. Resurrection medicine could not save Donny. It will not help more than two-thirds of Americans, who are overweight or obese. We need to shift health care policy and reimbursement toward effectively treating obesity – which is at the root of much of the ill health in our nation. <\/p>\n

Let’s make it so we have no more deaths like Donny’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Kay Judge Donny Phillips died last month. Quietly, desperately, sadly. Donny was a 35-year-old man, sick for most of his life, with a disease that health insurance does not acknowledge or reimburse for. At the end of his life, Donny could not get out of his bed. His body was too weak to hold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}