Why is it desirable or important that physicians and public health professionals learn to collaborate more together?
RL: It s moved beyond desirable to become imperative. It s important to do this with a disease like diabetes. We know that we need good medical care because if we treat these diseases, we can prevent a lot of complications. But in order to get people active in good medical care, you need to provide them with a variety of public support services so they can overcome logistical barriers like problems with transportation, translation or child care. To get them to keep up with therapy for diseases like hypertension, which is a financial hardship, to convince people to take drugs, sometimes home visits are very helpful. We need public health strategies like population-based screening because these diseases do a lot of damage when they are asymptomatic. Think about hypertension. People don t know they have hypertension. If we don t do population-based screening and identify it, a lot of damage has already been done. And finally, we have looked at individual issues like counseling for diet an
