Dr. Barry Baines

But when we were kicking this around to talk a little bit about managing your health,

the thing that came to mind is, you know, stuff that comes in the area mostly of what's called primary prevention.

And I think actually we should probably nail down some definitions just so that our listening audience, you know, has a sense that when we talk about prevention, prevention, prevention, there's primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary prevention.

And I'm going to,

kind of give a brief definition for this, and please jump in if I stumble on one of these.

But primary prevention is where you actually are able to prevent an illness or disease from ever happening.

And so, you know, one example that's, you know, an easy one or used to be easy, but has now socially and politically has become a hot potato.

You get a vaccine for polio and you never get polio.

You get a vaccine for measles, you never get measles.

OK, that's.

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

That, that's a big, that's a big part of it.

And I'm going to delve into that because that's, that's the one that's, I don't know, I guess appeals to me the most because it has the most, the biggest impact if you could prevent something from happening.

you know, before it even gets there.

And then secondary prevention really focuses on early diagnosis and interventions of an illness.

So the example I'll give is that if somebody, through regular checkups, let's say it determines that they have adult onset diabetes, okay,

then you can really intervene early to do both lifestyle changes and medications to help control it so that the disease really doesn't continue to get worse and worse, where then you move into all the problems that you get from diseases over the long term.

And the tertiary prevention is where you're really trying to limit disability and death.

Right.