Response to : Georgia’s diabetes rate among highest in nation
As a health professional and registered dietitian for almost 20 years, I understand firsthand the difficulty individuals have trying to seek out preventative care for many preventable diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, liver disease and high blood pressure. According to the CDC, 9.7% of Georgians had diagnosed diabetes in 2009, up from 6.1% diagnosed a decade ago. Dr. Kimberly Redding, director of the health promotion and disease prevention programs at the Georgia Department of Community Health states that obesity causes insulin resistance which leads to diabetes. I applaud Dr. Redding and her willingness to tackle this problem through nutrition programs and healthy foods but when Georgia health insurance programs will not recognize the practitioner’s best trained to deliver these medical nutrition services (registered dietitians), the obesity and diabetes problem will continue to grow.
According to Iowa Senator Tom Harkins, we have systematically neglected wellness and disease prevention. We spend 95% of every healthcare dollar treating illnesses and conditions after they occur. Basically, we spend peanuts on prevention. In addition, 75% of healthcare costs are accounted for by heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer and obesity. These five diseases and conditions are largely preventable and even reversible by changes in nutrition, physical activity and lifestyle. The United States of America and Georgia can no longer afford to ignore the epidemic crisis called obesity.
Dr. Stanley A. Cohen states that the cost of obesity threatens to swamp health care reform. We need to expand the coverage for the prevention and the treatment of obesity. Surprisingly startling is the fact that many health insurance programs do not reimburse health practitioners for patient visits until other more serious problems have developed, such as liver disease and diabetes. We have medically trained nutrition professionals here in Georgia and around the USA that can work with these populations but the health insurance community must ensure that preventative services are covered expenses when delivered by trained professionals such as registered dietitians.
There are real people living behind these statistics that need our help. We can no longer ignore the fact that according to The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), American’s spend upwards of $174 billion dollars (both direct and indirect costs) on the treatment of diabetes. Our healthcare system and insurance providers need to start helping patients before they become diabetic- paying for preventative visits and including registered dietitians as a practitioner of choice.
Pre-diabetes is a condition in which individuals have blood glucose, also called blood sugar, or A1C levels higher than normal but not high enough to be classified as diabetes. People with pre-diabetes have an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Studies have shown that people with pre-diabetes who lose weight and increase their physical activity can prevent or delay type 2 diabetes and in some cases return their blood glucose levels to normal.
Health practitioners such as Registered Dietitians are medically trained to offer medical nutrition therapy for conditions such as obesity, diabetes, liver disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer and many others preventable conditions because of their extensive evidence-based care which includes nutrition assessment, determining the nutrition diagnosis, implementing a nutrition intervention and monitoring the patient’s progress.
We can no longer ignore obesity and the healthcare providers medically trained to offer counseling and support to them.
