A Call for Preventive Medicine Attention for Indonesian Physicians

Abstract

The year of 2020 teaches us to prevent is always better than to cure. It is an old phrase that is being used for decades, but it is never been implemented cordially by our society nowadays. Covid-19 is a good lesson that reminds us to carefully prevent the spread of coronavirus which is now a pandemic worldwide. People now wash their hands more often and clean, wear a mask everywhere – everytime, do physical distancing, do healthy lifestyle such as physical activity, healthy diet, and consume multivitamins. They obey the cough and sneeze etiquette. Prevention awareness is never been such popular like todays.

For internal medicine specialist, the role for prevention is very broad. Besides we still have a role in primary prevention, we can take our part in both secondary and (of course) tertiary prevention. Primary prevention can be defined as an action not allow a disease to occur, for examples vaccination (for internal medicine specialist more specific as adult vaccination), smoking cessation, physical activity (exercise) and healthy diet. Health promotion and prevention is the core of primary prevention. Secondary prevention aims to detect the disease as early as possible, in at risk population, such as mammography for breast cancer, swab test for Covid-19, colonoscopy for colon cancer in high risk patients. Last, tertiary prevention propose to hamper the progress of clinical disease and prevent more severe complications of the disease, for examples cardiac rehabilitation, or medications for prevent chronic kidney disease in patients with diabetes or hypertension. It is overlapping the curative or treatment strategies as it is states “to cure is to prevent”. In 2020, in which each underlying conditions require effective treatment and each disease should be prevented. We are now facing the era of preventive medicine. As an internal medicine specialist, we need to put in mind a philosophy of prevention in every of our action towards patient’s care and services.