Most wholistic-minded practitioners already understand the value of preventative medicine and the long-term savings to the medical system by treating chronic disease. Now we have real numbers to substantiate what we know to be true and to help convince the skeptics, thanks to some hard number-crunching by the consulting firm Frost and Sullivan.
Their objective can best be described in their executive summary:
“A review of dietary supplement scientific literature that covers eight dietary supplement regimens across four non-communicable diseases was carried out. From this review, an overall change in the risk of a given disease-related event with the use of each of the supplements has been deduced. Then, these impact variables are used as critical input into a cost-benefit scenario analysis to determine the potential change in economic benefits—in terms of avoided hospital utilisation costs—that could be realised if everybody in a specified high-risk population group were to use each of the dietary supplements at specified intake levels that have been associated with protective effects.”
For example, they calculated the cost of taking the supplements that support bone health, based on real products, and subtracted that from the projected cost of fractures associated with osteoporosis and determined the overall savings between 2013-2020. It’s hard to summarise how many billions and billions of dollars would be saved through simple supplementation, but trust me, it was a lot. We can only hope that insurance companies take note and have some interest in saving money. Let alone the added benefit of people being healthier and living longer quality lives.
