Surgeon, entrepreneur and participant in a number of foreign missions with Doctors Without Borders Tomáš Šebek came up with an initiative of the Minister of Health, which has great ambitions: “By 2030 in the Czech Republic, we will increase the time spent in health by five years.”
“We have to start perceiving health as a commodity, like money, a career, a car, a family, a wife, children… If we always approach health in the following way: I’ll go to a hospital somewhere, the doctor will be there in a white coat, he’ll perform a miracle, he’ll administer give me some pill, cut me somewhere, solve my problem and I’ll be healthy again, that’s just nonsense. We need to start working with that,” says the respected doctor and founder of the portal ULékaře.cz Tomáš Šebek in the Gallery of Personalities.
According to Šebek, the statistical data are very telling, which show that although Czechs are at the top in Europe in terms of the number of visits to the doctor per year, their lives after the age of 62 usually fall into diseases. While in Western Europe this situation occurs ten years later.
“We should try not to be immortal in illness, but to be mortal in health,” says Šebek. And to this vision – including strong support for prevention – the entire society should adapt the settings of the entire healthcare system.
“Today, even we as doctors are set up in such a way that we have to treat expensively. For this, the employer will praise us, that we will earn money by treating someone, and the health insurance company will pay for it. They didn’t teach us in school that our best patient will be the one we never see. These are two basic dogmas: to educate the generation of medics in a different way and to remake us old matadors of medicine a little, and on the other hand to explain to eleven million Czechs that health is simply a commodity.”
The necessity, according to him, is the introduction of company doctors, when the employers themselves will see to it that their people have affordable health care, and therefore also preventive examinations.
When life loses its meaning in old age
On the project Minister of Health Tomáš Šebek works with eight dozen experts, including economic and business experts. According to Tomáš Šebek, the current system, where the treatment of diseases caused by an unhealthy lifestyle and neglected prevention is covered by health insurance in the vast majority of cases, is doomed to failure.
Photo: Michal Šula, Seznam Zpravy
“I’m a fan of one day being able to inject nanobots into our bloodstream, for example. It would run with the seven liters of blood and pass through all the organs and monitor my vital functions 24/7,” says Tomáš Šebek in an interview with Jiří Kubík.
“Today, money is collected in public collections for the treatment of rare diseases, because the system can’t take it anymore. We have this in quotes so far only as a bonus of the current system, because it really can extend the absolute life span. But even my patients come to me in a situation where I do routine surgery, saying that sometimes they wish I would kill them because life has no meaning anymore… They have already lost their health and the system just keeps them sick, they don’t care good for the soul, the body, or a combination.”
According to Tomáš Šebek, the way is to clearly turn the whole setting around, when people themselves will try to live as long as possible in health, therefore they themselves, employers and the education system will support prevention.
“Imagine that Pepiček or Marenka come home and say: ‘Mom, dad, we learn such things at school…’ This is where it starts. Then it can go through financial instruments, maintaining health can be subsidized financially. It could be a commercial supplement, it could be preferred by your employer because it’s pragmatic for them.’
An expert study, also based on foreign experience, is offered by the Minister of Health project to all those who make decisions about the health sector, including politicians. In addition to prevention, they discuss in detail other necessary steps, namely the digitization of the entire system and the sustainability of financing.
In the interview, Tomáš Šebek describes in detail his approach to a healthy lifestyle (“Šebkovo High Five”), explains how many digital devices monitoring various vital functions he wears on his body, and also returns to the period when he decided to radically fight his fears and the anxieties he carried from childhood.
You can listen to the interview with Tomáš Šebek in the audio version at the beginning of the article – we will publish the transcript and video recording of the entire interview on Saturday.
