My grandmothers are the reason I became curious about prevention. One of my grandmothers smoked and died from pancreatic cancer. My other grandmother is still alive but also battles obesity and high blood pressure. When I think about it, it hit me that almost every single one of those is something public health works to prevent. That’s not a coincidence, and it stopped prevention from being a boring word for me.
I keep seeing the same lesson everywhere I go. Volunteering at Orlando Health, working on the public health virtual internship in Nigeria, helping younger kids at the local community rec center, and learning at my medical research program at UCF this summer. Over and over, it’s clear that it’s better and cheaper to stop people from getting sick than to only treat them once they already are.
I’m a sports and music kid first. I’d rather be at the gym or making beats than doing almost anything. But I want to point that same energy at public health, because the questions I can’t stop thinking about are the big ones: why do some communities get sicker than others, and what can we change before anyone ends up in a hospital bed?
Bottom line: Stopping disease before it starts is the whole game, and that’s what I want to learn more and more about.
