| I'm sorry the OP has to endure this. Grief is long. The story reminds me that busy people don't seek health care enough (not saying it would have changed anything in this case). We wait until something is so bad that we can't work. But we really don't want to wait. Roughly speaking, health care can prevent many, many things, but it's rare that it can solve something once it's so bad that it actually interferes with life or work. So the real efficacy of health care lies in prevention and early intervention. It's natural to be prone to choosing the urgent over the important. That's why you should counter by encouraging those in your circle to take care, since you would never de-prioritize the important for your loved ones. So get them to do it, and do it for them. Preventative care is mostly a matter of self-education (based on real sources), self-monitoring, and nurturing good active providers. It's not strongly limited by resources. It includes building trust within your biological family to share genetic risks and disease incidence. Knowledge and monitoring should increase your confidence and peace of mind (i.e., if you find it making you anxious, then it's existential anxiety directed at health, which should be otherwise addressed). And there may not be a "payback" because you may never know what problems you prevented; the only feedback would be relief from catching something early enough to do something about it. So it's not part of the reward system feedback loop; just do it on principle, based on the efficacy profile of health care with prevention and early detection. |