Does Prevention Prevent the Cure?

In almost all areas of life we've problems that have to be solved. Whether inside our personal life or running a business few things run smoothly. The solution? Solve the issues, dummy!

I am sorry to complicate matters, but you can find frequently two categories that problem-solving falls into. One category serves as a "curing" or "coping with the outward symptoms" or "magic pill". I'll call it "fire-fighting" for the purposes of brevity. Another category is prevention. Some problems. especially major ones, require both: an instantaneous fix accompanied by preventative measures. Actually, within an ideal world, all problems could have this treatment. Needless to say, the truth that you can find problems to begin with tells us that is not a perfect world. The barrier to utopia is bound resources.

Take health for instance: within an ideal world doctors would practice combine fire-fighting cures with preventative medicine. We'd all have regular check-ups, have personalised diets and also lifestyles prescribed to us - perhaps have an individual physician assigned to every single one folks, watching over us night and day. As that is clearly impossible, healthcare specialists, like most of us, must prioritise.

Having established that resources are finite, what balance must doctors strike between fire-fighting and prevention? This, needless to say, can be an age-old dilemma that societies face. If one talks about this issue superficially, the final outcome that could be reached is: "If we prevent problems then there's little dependence on fire-fighting". That is true somewhat but surely depends upon the situation. Actually, this will depend on the partnership between your cost of prevention versus the expense of fire-fighting.

Fighting true to life fires certainly are a good example that demonstrate the dilemma. We'd all prefer to have a fire station by the end of our roads but we all have been sensible enough to learn that people couldn't afford it. In the united kingdom, our fire service gets the dual role of putting out actual fires and preventing them. Of their limited resources they have to ensure that there's a balance struck between your commitment devoted to precautionary measures such as for example issuing fire certificates, educating the general public about fire risks etc and having enough people and equipment to tackle blazes if they occur. The fire service doesn't make these judgements superficially. They carefully think about different risk factors and allocate resources accordingly.

Back to the doctors. We're able to screen healthy people for several types of illnesses. The issue with this particular approach is that a lot of of individuals that will have already been screened could have never contracted the condition. In effect, the amount of money, commitment spent on those individuals could have been wasted. Alternatively, in case a particular illness was relatively common - take breast cancer for instance - and, if caught too late, devastating to the ones that contracted it, it could make sense to truly have a screening programme.

I indicate that the ones that preach preventative medicine have an extended hard look at what they're proposing. Would a significant preventative screening or educatitive programme work, or would it not consume precious resources? For a few problems this can be the case - however, not for several.

In our business we sell fly killer machines and fly screens. Here's another exemplory case of the total amount between fire-fighting and prevention. Our fly screens are suited to doors and windows and prevent any flies from entering a building. This isn't only very desirable, additionally it is the law in the united kingdom where open food has been prepared in commercial premises. That is prevention. Practically all of our fly screen customers also purchase fly killer machines. These do the fire-fighting. Somebody, somewhere will inevitably leave a fly screen open or simply remove one for cleaning, letting in a fly. Flies are pretty nasty with regards to spreading germs and the fly killers will be the last defence. We strongly urge our customers, especially those involved with food preparation, to possess both fly killers and fly screens installed.