Category: health | 衛生保健 | 보건 의료

I have a relatively small amount of health related posts on this blog at the moment. But it’s becoming an area that’s impossible to ignore. Health and wellness is becoming central to mainstream culture.

Anxiety and loneliness have sparked what is considered by many to be a mental health epidemic and a corresponding reduction in societal resilience.

High income countries were spending as much as 14 percent of government spending on health before the COVID pandemic. The number is likely to be even higher now.

According to an article in medical journal The Lancet, poor mental health cost the global economy approximately 2.5 trillion US dollars per year and this was expected to rise to 6 trillion by 2030.

It’s an area that can’t be ignored, because of the financial burden and size of market that the sector represents.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic a UN report said the following:

Psychological distress in populations is widespread. Many people are distressed due to the immediate health impacts of the virus and the consequences of physical isolation. Many are afraid of infection, dying, and losing family members. Individuals have been physically distanced from loved ones and peers. Millions of people are facing economic turmoil having lost or being at risk of losing their income and livelihoods.

The report went on to recommend solutions such as:

  • Crafting communications to be not only effective but sensitive to their impact on the mental state of the populous
  • Community events looking at cementing social cohesion
  • Extending tele-medicine to include tele-counselling for frontline health-care workers and people at home with depression and anxiety.

I started to look at trends in March 2020 and there was a singularity developing around innovation and technology in the area, together with some interesting cossumer behaviour trends. Young adults made up a sizeable chunk of telemedicine non-users and as resistors to public health initiatives. Their much vaunted ‘online literacy’ saw them fall for the same tropes and older audiences considered more gullible like pensioners and retirees in Facebook groups