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The Chief Medical Director, Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja, Professor Adetokunbo Fabamwo, has urged the government and medical stakeholders across the country to promote preventive medicine and policies that will enable people to adopt a healthy lifestyle.
This, he said remains the cheapest as against curative treatment which is expensive to manage.
He disclosed this in Lagos during a visit to his office by Ehingbeti 2022 officials to intimate him on the significance of the center to the achievement of Ehingbeti agenda of new Lagos.
Addressing the team led by the Special Assistant to the Governor on Human Capital Development and Special Adviser to the Governor of Health, the CMD noted that preventive medicine is cheap and much cheaper to prevent illness.
He noted that such is the policy the government needs to be promoting for people at this critical moment.
“Let me give you an example, it is cheaper to ask a man to stop drinking too much alcohol, to stop smoking, eating fatty foods, and sedentary lifestyles. It is cheaper for a man to be active and engage in physical exercise. It is cheaper for a big man to ask his driver to stop at the gate of the hospital and work the rest to the office. It is also cheaper for a big man to go into his skyscraper building and climb six or seven floors rather than taking the lift.
“These are all measures that people can take to have a healthy lifestyle, but by the time aan is brought to the hospital for a treatment the problems start from the tests that the man is going to conduct. Tests now are very expensive, drugs are very expensive, carrying our surgeries are very expensive. So , it is better to avoid all that than to wait until disease spreads into your body and then you have surgery and drug treatment.”
He however, praised the Lagos state government for their regular community screening across the state.
“Lagos state conducts community screening, they move into a community and then they screen for different diseases and then they check women breast for a lump, check men if their prostate is enlarged, do blood glucose test, blood pressure and immediately they are treated. “Now, when you talk about advanced care, the one we carry out in LASUTH is expensive. There is nowhere in the world where advanced care is cheap. But what most other countries have done is to make sure that rich people pay for the poor people through health insurance.”
For the SA to the Lagos Governor, Dr. Tunde Ajayi, health is so crucial to the wellbeing of the society in any economy and “for us LASUTH is the state responsibility.”
