We all know eating right, exercise, and avoiding substances that harm us are important aspects of being healthy, but it goes beyond just that. Living a healthy lifestyle and going to the doctors for regular checkups can help you avoid diseases that will lead to surgery, daily medications, and even death. A healthy lifestyle doesn’t just keep you feeling well and full of energy, but is the best therapeutic option we have for most diseases.

Taking smoking for example; cigarettes cause a wide array of diseases from cancer to COPD. Once the disease is developed the individual will have to go through an ordeal of multiple doctors appointments and medical treatments that are costly and often uncomfortable. Even still, the medical provider most often will not be able to cure the disease caused smoking, but simply keep you functioning at the next best level. Once diseases like COPD are developed the damage is irreversible and medical treatments are simply putting band-aids on the problem.

The true key to health is avoiding getting sick in the first place. The CDC is now putting a larger emphasis on this notion and medical providers are finally getting compensated for prevention education. This is important because the health care field is becoming more and more business focused, so what providers can bill for will get the most attention. For a long time, medical providers were not getting compensated to educate on preventive measures but were getting paid to treat diseases. As a result, the focus was on treating the diseases, not their prevention. Even today a medical provider can bill much more to treat a disease than to prevent it and that is a large flaw in the medical industry.

Types of preventive medicine include; vaccines, annual exams, screenings by guideline, and healthy lifestyle education.