An important part of health care reform that I haven’t even touched upon is wellness and prevention. Even though I am a physician, I don’t feel I know enough about this topic. Medical education focuses on disease, not wellness – at least for physicians of my generation. Hopefully that has changed or will change for future doctors.

There is strong, bipartisan support for including prevention and wellness in the health care reform bills. Our own Senator Tom Harkin, who feels strongly about this issue, has introduced the Healthy Workforce Act, which basically gives employers a tax credit for each employee that participates in wellness initiatives.

I have recently become interested in functional medicine (also called integrative medicine), and even attended a conference on mood disorders sponsored by the Institute for Functional Medicine at the end of May. These practitioners have a different approach to the management of the chronic diseases that cost our health care system so much money. From the little I know so far about the topic, their approach seems to hold potential. In any case, in my opinion more research needs to be done to evaluate how diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes impact chronic disease.

Speaking of which, one research project on exercise and Parkinson’s disease was inspired by Iowa’s own RAGBRAI. Since our intrepid editor, Trish Nelson, and I both just finished RAGBRAI (I was a RAGBRAI virgin), I found this story on the beneficial effects of bicycling on Parkinson’s patients very interesting. You can view two television programs (Good Morning America and NBC Nightly News) about this research at the Pedaling for Parkinsons website. And I can tell you there is nothing we learned in medical school that would predict that riding RAGBRAI would improve movement in Parkinson’s patients for up to one month afterwards.