Revolutionizing Diabetes
Diabetes has become a serious epidemic in the world today. It comes with many complications such that if not detected early, it is costly to diagnose. Otherwise, it is cheap to treat and in some cases reversible if detected on time. Therefore, it is necessary that proper measures should be put in place to curb the existence of this epidemic in the society. Notably, the main solution is to revolutionize its treatment.
According to Texas Observer, diabetes epidemic has remained a big challenge in the Valley. This is attributed to the unwillingness of Texas to expand Medicaid to the millions of its residents who may be affected by this epidemic.
Furthermore, its existence is propelled by the failure of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to deal with the health care of immigrants who are undocumented. A study done by the health science students of the University of Texas show that approximately $82.8 million is utilized yearly on preventable cases of diabetes complications (Tyx). As a result, public health students and Wickwire are dreaming to revolutionize the treatment of diabetes to curb it in the Valley. Unfortunately, many diabetic patients go untreated because of availability of inadequate clinic screens. This makes many people not to go for screening to detect the disease in its early stages. As a result, they seek medication when it has developed complications thus difficult to diagnose. As a way to revolutionize the treatment of diabetes in the Valley, Wickwire, and the health students have proposed to reach out to many people and make the treatment affordable to them.
According to the health care providers, they will not wait for the patients to visit medical centers but organize community outreach to save the lives of these people.Prevalence of diabetes is said to have been contributed by a shortage of doctors in the society.
For example, it is estimated that there are 54.6 doctors per 100,000 people in the Valley compared to 69.5 in Texas (Tyx). This ratio is low that if is not dealt with; it is difficult to eradicate the diabetic epidemic. To address this shortage, the University of Texas proposes to merge its two campuses, which are far apart into one school of medicine. The main objective of this school is to reach out to the community in providing quality health care to the residents. The students will work as social workers in coordination with the primary care doctors to provide treatment to the residents. Moreover, to reach out to many people, mobile clinics will be situated in different places in the valley.
The graduates will be in those clinics to provide health care services to everyone in the region. This will help to reduce the disparity brought about by the shortage of doctors.To combat diabetes effectively, we need to provide elemental care rather than just primary care. This can be effectively done by use of modern machines, which can do the proper screening. For example, the University of Texas uses a genome-sequencing machine to screen …
