 |
|
     |
|
 |
February 25, 2003 Social Science Key to Restoring American Health, Says AAAS President
Social science research should
be at the heart of a new effort to restore the American health care system,
says Floyd Bloom, M.D., Ph.D., president of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society. "The puzzles of better health promotion and disease prevention may be approached more rapidly and effectively through intensified social science research, rather than by awaiting the expected evolution of gene-based explanations and interventions based on future genetic discoveries," Bloom said at the AAAS February meeting in Denver. In his Denver speech, the AAAS president proposed a new national commission to consider health care reforms and said that AAAS would take an active role in proposing commission experts and guidelines. Bloom cited the British Whitehall studies, which compared health outcomes and stress among civil servants, as a good example of how social and behavioral factors should receive greater attention in American health care. Many of the World Health Organization's top 10 public health threats also lend themselves to social science solutions, Bloom said. Poor access to health care and failures to translate discoveries into practice are among the biggest shortcomings of American medicine, said Bloom, who believes that the current health care system has effectively "collapsed." "There's a feeling that the solutions of genomic medicine are not going to converted into practical health care measures any time soon. We need an infrastructure for delivering those solutions," Bloom said in an interview with The Scientist. To read more about
Bloom's speech, go to http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2003/0213bloom.shtml.
|
|
|||||
 |
|||||||
