Nigerians need to embrace preventive medicine – Dr. Nse Onyebuchi

Dr. Nse Onyebuchi is well known in Nigeria’s health care circle as she worked in the public healthcare system be­fore she incorporated her firm. She is bringing something new to health­care in Nigeria as she’s combining conventional and lifestyle strategies in the treatment of diabetes and other diseases . Already one year in business, she is making astounding success in her chosen field of health­care. In this interview with Sunday Sun, she reveals quite a lot about her motivation and challenges.

Excerpts:

Who are you?

My name is Nse Onyebuchi. I graduated as a medical doctor at the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus. I also have a master’s degree from the University of Birmingham in Public and Environmental Health.

What’s your motivation for what you are doing today?

My masters degree in Public Health was actually what changed my per­ception about medicine. When I first went for it, my colleagues here asked if I wanted to learn how to wash Lagos gutters, because that is what environ­mental health officers did in Lagos in the 60s and 70s. I wasn’t discouraged but wondered what the course entailed.

When I got to Birmingham, I checked out the main public health class, and eventually choose the en­vironmental health class. The environ­ment is not just the space around you; it’s you, your work, your life, your cul­ture, beliefs, your ethnic background, and how these affect health.

The World Health Organisation’s definition of health states “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

This means you don’t have to be sick to be unhealthy. If you are not hap­py on your job, you are not well, your stress level is high. If you are not happy in your environment, you are not well. We were shown the relationship be­tween emotional and physical health and how the different dimensions of health intertwine.

We had a lot of practical lessons. For instance, there was a lovely hous­ing development with parks but no one ever came out to walk or exercise. Some of us thought the people were plain lazy but after asking from door-to-door interviews, we found out that the people were afraid to go to the park because of bad boys, stray dogs, dog poop, etc.

Subsequently, the police now evict­ed the miscreants out of the place, people were fined for allowing their dogs to stray or the dogs were taken away. You won’t believe that in less than six months, people started walk­ing out freely, people were a bit health­ier and were a bit happier.

So, before we categorize people as something, we need to know why they are not doing certain things. During an­other interview too, we also found out why people were smoking especially women, because when you smoke, you lose weight. It’s cold there and when you tell them to stop smoking, you need to replace the bad habit with a good one as well as create another avenue for losing weight. From these I realised how our lifestyles actually af­fect our health.

How healthy are Nigerians?

In our society, people don’t appreci­ate preventive medicine. We are more reactive than proactive when it comes to health. Something major has to happen before we see a doctor. A lot of awareness on the health benefits of prevention has to be created especially with the global epidemic of obesity, di­abetes, hypertension and stroke. These diseases are called non-communicable diseases, or lifestyle diseases or West­ern diseases. They take a long time to progress, cannot be cured and usually do not show symptoms until compli­cations arise. They’re best diagnosed from routine health check-ups.

Diabetes, hypertension, stroke and certain cancers once called diseases of the elderly now affect people be­low forty-five. These people are in the working class age group. They are de­bilitating diseases that require life-long treatment and greatly increase the risk of serious, long-term complications.

Diseases from these conditions are accelerating globally, advancing across every region and pervading all socio­economic class. Unless addressed, the death rate and disease from these health problems will continue to in­crease. While premature death is a real threat, most people with chronic dis­eases live longer . However, their qual­ity of life may suffer and their indepen­dence may be compromised such that they retire from active service early, cannot enjoy the productive or fulfill­ing activities they once did.

Sometimes, we hear people sleep and didn’t wake up, half of that is caused by high blood pressure, or sometimes a combination of diabetes and high blood pressure. It is annoying that this is happening to younger peo­ple. This means that before we know it, soon, retirement age, will become forty five years, because we are suffer­ing from old peoples disease at thirty, so in fifteen years time, such persons would probably have complications and won’t be able to walk. It won’t just affect your health alone, it would affect your finances and relationships. It’s indeed our duty to take care of ourselves because no one else will do it for us.

Let’s stop being falsely optimistic about our health and undergo medi­cal check-ups and follow up. When I tell apparently healthy people that they have to come to the clinic, they ask ‘what am I coming there for? I tell them well, they need to check their blood pressure and their blood sugar and undergo screening . You know what they tell me? They say “God for­bid, it’s not my portion. It does not run in my family” I tell them yes, it’s not your portion but if you know, simply changing one thing in your life can ac­tually prolong your life.

You worked at LUTH, why did you retire?

I was bored. I loved what I was do­ing but the job was not just challenging enough. I still use what I learnt there. I did not get job satisfaction. I didn’t mind the salary at all but I was just not satisfied. I am doing what I like now. I can wake up in the middle of the night and try to research on what I am do­ing now. It was a struggle while I was working with the government to wake up and read for an exam. I know when I read now, I read because I am practic­ing what I read.

How and why did you set up Kairos Lifestyle?

It was after my masters degree pro­gramme I decided to set up this agency. I went for my masters because I needed something to do. I went for the masters to see if maybe I could still continue in this line of medicine otherwise I would have just done an MBA. When I went for my masters, I then found out I had to do this.

Kairos Lifestyle was therefore es­tablished to add value to lives through public health. We however started from health talks, outreaches and workshops.

How did you incorporate Kai­ros Lifestyle?

After I left the government service, I worked for my husband in his business, though his business was more of fash­ion. After a while, I then told myself, this was not what I wanted to do, let me just face medicine where I don’t need to dress big before coming to work. I started working on establishing Kairos in June 2013 but we started operations in December of the same year. We are really trying to create awareness about what we are doing here and that is why we are doing outreaches. Some com­panies have actually supported us with drugs.

How did you raise capital for the business?

My husband supported me and I’m hardworking too.

What challenges are you fac­ing?

In Nigeria, it’s sad to say that we work for money and we do not work for the growth of a firm. Also, Lagos State government is very unfriendly when it comes to taxation imposed es­pecially on small businesses. I started in December 2013 and by January, La­gos State started assessing me for tax and I am like tax from where.

So, human capital which involves attitude to work mostly, unstable power supply and punitive taxes imposed on small businesses in summary are the challenges my organization deal with.

What’s Kairos Lifestyle into?

We are into promoting healthy liv­ing as a method of preventing and treating illness. Achieving optimal wellbeing and aging in a healthy way is our credo.

Kairos is Greek for the opportuned time, the right time, God’s time. What we basically do is health assessments and health check-ups. We perform comprehensive health check-ups in a clean and ambient environment. We recommend exercise as medicine as well as nutritional remedies, health coaching, stress management, pain management, physical therapy and offer social support. We offer person­alised health care services and lifestyle modification services to tackle difficult to treat lifestyle diseases.

Other services include but are not limited to medical outreaches, coordi­nated school health services, corporate wellness, holistic retirement planning and health workshops.

Do you mean you do not treat people with medication?

We combine conventional and life­style medicine (nutrition, fitness, posi­tive stress coping) to take care of the whole person – body and mind not just his symptoms. Exercise is a remedy for all diseases. When you exercise, it improves your blood flow, when it im­proves your blood flow, it takes away the toxins and fits your cells with nu­trients and oxygen and all. You find out that simply having that happening to your body, you feel good, you are more relaxed. If you have diabetes and you exercise, there is a hormone called in­sulin and when you exercise, it makes that hormone effective. By exercising, you can actually lower your blood sugar and it can be used to also treat the early stages of high blood sugar called pre-diabetes, and infertility. There is no disease that cannot be treated with ex­ercise. Even when you are depressed, there is something that exercise does for you, it makes you a little happy.

An important aspect of medicine is that you can heal yourself from your mind, if you decide to be well, you will be well. If you have headache for in­stance, don’t just pop paracetamol, find out why you are having the headache. Could it be hunger, lack of sleep, anxi­ety or high blood pressure?

How affordable is Kairos?

Very, very affordable

Could you give us a glimpse into your customer base?

I am actually targeting working class age group and women of all ages. I went to a school and I shared flyers on diabetes, I wasn’t targeting chil­dren, I was targeting their parents but a few parents walked up to me and said “we need you to talk to us on how to manage our children, we have children that have diabetes.” Though initially I wasn’t targeting them but with my new flyers when I made them again, I now included adults and children too. Children are diabetic because our diet is not okay. Children are not play­ing the way they are supposed to play even in school. When they come back home, because of security reasons, we don’t let them run around like they should, so they are all caged inside the house playing video games and from one video game to another movie so they are inactive. So now, my clients include adolescents and the elderly.

Can you give some health tips Nigerians should imbibe?

Genes and environment play a role in determining our health. Health is wealth, if you have money and you don’t have good health, you can’t enjoy your money. Lifestyle simply means the way we do things; the way we eat, what we eat, how we eat it, when we eat it, our level of physical activity, alcohol consumption, and smoking. Unhealthy eating, inactivity/sedentary work, excessive alcohol consumption and smoking are the common risk fac­tors hypertension, diabetes and some cancers share. Let’s make our health a priority, prevention is sure better than cure.