Dr. Jeffrey Gladden argues doctors treat heart disease instead of preventing it, despite it being the leading cause of death. He says physicians should shift focus to prevention, aligning with why most entered medicine: to transform lives, not just manage illness.
At a high level, there's no reason that heart disease still needs to be the number one killer. And if we reshape our focus a little bit, if we think more about how do we prevent this rather than just what can we do to manage it and make it a little better once patients are already sick, yeah, as physicians, I think it really gets us close. It really gets more to the heart of why most of us became physicians. We really didn't go into this to maybe make people. A little bit better. We went into it to really change people's lives. That's right. This is how we can do that. And hopefully what I'm doing, what you're doing, right, this can all be examples to our colleagues that they can do it as well. And that's how we're really going to change the whole nature of the medical system.
