Prevention better

To the editor:

On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I can’t help but wonder how our world would be different if it had been prevented. The concept of using a jetliner as a weapon had been featured in a Tom Clancy novel, “Debt of Honor,” published way back in 1994, but the possibility of a real life scenario escaped the best and brightest minds in our security establishment. If just one individual had recognized the necessity of reinforcing cockpit doors and allowing no access under any circumstances, he or she would have been the true hero of 9/11 — but we would have never known.

More recently, our country faced an even greater threat, the collapse of our financial system. The combined efforts of the Bush and Obama administrations, via TARP, the rescue of the American automobile industry, and the stimulus package, were able to arrest an economic free-fall, but couldn’t correct a decade of both personal and governmental financial mismanagement, so we are left with a sluggish economy. Despite the fact that those measures “only” prevented another Great Depression, their worth was enormous according to the economists who understand this stuff.

As a family physician, I work in a world of prevention. I understand I will never be as valued for preventing a heart attack as is the cardiologist who opens up the closed artery, but the effect is the same. Just because prevention is hard to quantify, does not mean its value is not real, whether in medicine, national security or economics.