4 ms·
> Ordering A1C, remembering to actually check the results, and telling patient to stop eating sugar - well before they are symptomatic for diabetes. Yeah, it's
by chimeracoder 10y ago
> Ordering A1C, remembering to actually check the results, and telling patient to stop eating sugar - well before they are symptomatic for diabetes.
Yeah, it's that last part ("telling patient to stop eating sugar" [and getting them to actually change their behavior]) that's the hard part.
This is the holy grail of medicine and has been for decades. We've done billions of dollars of research over the last century, and the one clear thing we've found is that we do not know of any cost-effective way to get patients to change their behavior at large[0].
Seriously, if you really have the answer to that question, you could be a multi-billionaire.
[0] That is, we can change behavior of some patients, but they're generally the patients who would have changed their behavior anyway. And we can change the behavior of some of the rest, but they're not cost-effective.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoIf you knew how to do that, you could also solve the climate change / global warming problem, as well as host of other big social issues at the same time. As it is, people simply follow the incentive gradient, and most of the time there's damn little you can do about it.
- neffy 10y agoAnd so it turns out once again, in every field, people really are the problem ...
- lliamander 10y agoThere is, of course, the (unintended?) side-effect that if there was a cost-effective way for controlling peoples' behavior then we would be effectively under the tyranny of whomever possessed those means. Sometimes we just have to let other people live with the consequences of their actions; which is hard, because often we also have to live with those consequences. Whatever we say about "other people", we should also remember that we are "other people" to somebody.
- maxerickson 10y agoTaxes? Like, what might be the huge negative cost of tobacco taxes? (There's an argument to be made for freedom, but you are making an economic argument about costs, not a moral one)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- xapata 10y agoUnfortunately, taxes don't always make significant reductions of usage for addictive substances and may shift commerce towards illegal markets.
- gleb 10y agoRight. Patient compliance is a hard problem. But doctor compliance with basic protocols is also very bad, and seems fixable with computers.