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Chronic illness
Patterns of illness have changed massively over the last 200 years. Modern medicine and improved sanitation has wiped out many communicable diseases like cholera in the UK, while serious accidents and acute illnesses like pneumonia are no longer an automatic death sentence. But now our health service is struggling to adapt to a new challenge, with around 80% of GP consultations and the vast majority of spending in the NHS taken up by chronic illnesses.
Chronic (ie. long-term) illness includes conditions like allergies, back pain, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, stress and some types of heart disease. Many of these are preventable and not initially life-threatening, but they can develop until they overwhelm the sufferer's life. They undermine work and social opportunities. There is a huge economic cost too, even beyond the direct health spending - many employers struggle with the responsibility of supporting staff with for example, stress, depression or chronic back pain. Finally, they can become fatal: over the next 10 years almost five million people in the UK will die from a chronic condition.
The cure for these illnesses doesn't usually lie in a single fix, but in reviewing whole lifestyles. Doctors need to be better equipped to help patients with illnesses where the solution is not a pill. Patients need to understand that they may find a way out of their condition only by making radically healthy choices - which may be very different from the norms of their previous lives.
But there's also a growing understanding that responsibility does not just lie with the individual. The huge increase in allergies in the past hundred years coincides with the industrialisation of our environment. Recent research indicates that we're living in a society that makes it easy for people to become obese, while the pace of life and break-up of communities can often contribute to depression and stress.
These pages will carry a growing body of information about chronic conditions - examining likely causes and building a picture of the multiple approaches that will help to tackle them. We will also be campaigning on these issues - describing how schools, workplaces, government and individuals can work towards the sort of changes in society that will make it easier for people and communities to be healthy.
