Why do I worry about NCDs?? are NCDs The new World War 3
NCDs means Non Communicable diseases. As we all know healthcare is SDG goal 3.
i believe you shape yourself through the experiences you go through in your life. i was a busy practising clinician in Leicester, one of the most beautiful parts of England. I guess earlier no one would knew where is Leicester, but since we won the England premier league trophy, Leicester needs no introduction.
on one busy afternoon a gentleman in his mid 40’s attended my clinic, and says he had lot of positive feed back about me and was hoping to get better quality of care. he has diabetes which ate into his kidneys so early in his life and now has Chronic Kidney Disease stage 4, he is quite aware that the next stage will be dialysis, and is completely horrified about his future.
Typical week of kidney disease patient on dialysis would be, he will attend hospital for dialysis early in the morning, which usually lasts about 4 hours excluding the travel and preparation. in other words by the time he come home it must be evening.
Then post dialysis tiredness and sickness may last till next day and the day after, he shall be ready for next cycle of dialysis as it will be done 3 times per week. it may feel like you are living only to get dialysis done. some times things may even be worse.
it erodes into your quality of life and takes away the pleasure of human living. Remember majority of these people worked hard in their life to save enough to have descent life at retirement and would want to play with their grand children. but with these diseases they are neither fit to spend quality time with grand children nor enjoying their own life, instead, they are spending majority of their day either in hospital or post-recovery phase.
That day i had no Diabetes/NCD expertise to help this guy, which i still regret that i could not make use of his time. oh boy he hit me right at my core values and i could not handle that guilt for many days and i went and immediately signed for masters in diabetes jointly offered by university of Leicester and Leicester diabetes research centre (LDC). I dedicated my masters thesis to this patient.
world class research and expertise at LDC was completely overwhelming, and suddenly i found myself between world class researchers, working day in and out to make difference to chronic disease patients. what an amazing time, and the most productive time of my life.
Gaining skills and expertise in diabetes and completing masters has completely changed my way of life. since then prevention has become a way of life for me.
we have not invented any time machines yet, that can take a kidney disease patient back to normality but we can certainly prevent it, and vast majority of chronic diseases are preventable.
NCDs account for nearly 2/3rd of all deaths world wide annually i.e. nearly 40 million deaths, that is more than half of total deaths due to world war 2, over a span of 5 years.
NCDs causing more deaths than any other catastrophe that human race has ever witnessed. NCDs are affecting all the countries across the Globe and affect women and men almost equally.
Are we in the middle of war, that we din’t even know??? has it began way before we realised???
now the million dollar question is do we have enough forces to win this war?? if so what are they??? together can we beat NCDs???
stay tuned………….
