>This is not a problem for the individual doctors to solve, but it should be something addressed by medicine in general as well as government policy (and conseq

>This is not a problem for the individual doctors to solve, but it should be something addressed by medicine in general as well as government policy (and consequently a lot more money than is currently being invested into it it seems). Otherwise what you are doing is the same thing as we call 'firefighting' in IT - constantly fixing up the symptoms and not fixing the root cause of the issue. I agree with you here, you need to incentivise people who would otherwise not plan ahead. We need to design our cities better, we need to get people more active, we need to improve social supports and interactions so that people's mental health is better. Sadly it doesn't look like much of the world is in a hurry to fix these problems. I do however completely disagree with you in regard to Chinese medicine, which is, from the position of efficacy, utterly worthless. Show me a well designed study that proves otherwise and I'll eat my hat, but in my years of study and investigation of alternative medicine the only study I am aware of that showed usefulness of Chinese medicine proved that it was 'time with practitioner' that resulted in the improvement, ie. talking to them about your problems, having a sympathetic ear. This makes sense because so many problems and hospital admissions are psychogenically driven - people derive great comfort from being able to externalise their existential angst. But Chinese medicine is not medicine. Strip the bullshit and hand waving from it and call them therapists, and go to your Chinese therapist - but don't call it medicine because they aren't treating shit