On February 15, the Primary Health Care Wellness Center will open to the public. Today we are sharing Dr. Bery Engebretsen’s story and vision behind how the wellness center came to be.
While medication can be used to treat diabetes and human behavior is hard to change, my choice as a physician is to focus on the fact that exercise and diet can treat diseases like diabetes and human behavior can be changed. This wellness journey for me began a long time ago, but with much wandering away from the path. The urge to pursue wellness has had many moments of inspiration that I can date back to my days in medical school.
As a sophomore, I took a pharmacology course where I learned that the incidence of heart disease (hypertension) has increased throughout human history as the amount of salt in our diet also increased.
My question at that time was, “Why can’t we just take salt out of the diet?” The common response was, “You can’t change human behavior.” Even then I wondered, given the amount of money pharmaceutical companies spent on advertising, was that really true?
The biggest advances in human health have been created by mundane things such as clean water and immunizations, not the glamorous world of organ transplantation or marvelous new drugs. Both of these advances were made not just by scientific research into the disease, but by societal decisions to address the problems.
When The United States decided to tackle the problem of clean drinking water, we were far less affluent than we are today. I believe that today’s public health challenges of access to healthy food and regular exercise are comparable to clean water and healthy food.
At the Wellness Center, our goal is to address these social determinants of health. Group visits will be a big part of what we do in the Wellness Center and we are excited to partner with the University of Chicago for a diabetes group research study.
This spring we will be planting our healing garden for a second season and I am also planning to lead regular “Walks with a Doc” around the neighborhood to provide community members and patients the opportunity to ask questions while getting out and moving.
As we gear up for a year of wellness programming, I look forward to the work our team will be doing at the Wellness Center to treat not just the disease like hypertension or diabetes, but the causes of the disease.