Hilal Uranbey - 9

"Prevention is better than cure."

Out of a country's health budget, a large proportion should be diverted from treatment to spending on health education and preventative measures.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement?

Every government spends a definite amount of money on health sector every year. Some people think that a large portion of health budget should be diverted from the treatment to health education and precautionary warning. I certainly do not accept that high expenditure should be spent on the evoking the awareness of the public because firstly a lot of people have access to medical knowledge and secondly some diseases are not avoidable.

In this day and time, a clear majority of people have access to basic medical knowledge from the internet. In addition to this, people know what to do to stay healthy very well, but they do not implement these procedures. For instance, a lot of trademarks of cigarette print warning on cigarette packets about the harms of smoking; nevertheless, the society goes ahead with smoking. As a second example, almost all of the people know that technological apparatuses extremely spread radiation and this situation makes a way for cancer. Even so, public keep on using up technological devices in every step of their lives. In the view of such information, health education and preventative measures do not seem efficient.

Moreover, as the second reason to support my thesis, it is a fact that not all diseases are blockable. A large part of humans have diseases such as achondroplasia that cannot be prevented. However, there is a treatment method for achondroplasia that should start from childhood. From a different view point, every person has experiences about a lot of accidents in their lives, an important part of which are unavertable. Based on all these reasons, it seems it is useless to spend a huge portion of the budget allocated for health on health education and preventative measures; instead, investing on the improvement of health technology and increasing the number of medical personnel sounds much more profitable for both society and government.

In conclusion, curing an unavoidable disease is more important than taking preventative measure. Due to the reasons mentioned above, the budget accolated for health should be used to improve health service and technology. I think, treating existing diseases and curing people are more efficient than giving information about health to people.