Over the course of his career, Dr. Seth Berkowitz has met with patients much like one of his first – a 300-pound farmer in rural North Carolina with diabetes and heart trouble.
“His own diet was highly processed food, and he knew that was making his health worse,” Berkowitz says. “You’d talk with him and he’d be like, ‘Oh, I know what I need to be doing. It’s just not an affordable thing for me.’”
Berkowitz says as he encountered the problem over and over – in North Carolina, the Bay Area and Boston – an idea hardened in in his mind. Many of his sickest patients would happily focus on health, if they could just deal with their more pressing problems first.
So Berkowitz, an internist, has designed a pilot program at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he works now, that he thinks just might work for his diabetic patients.
“We’re working with an organization that delivers medically tailored meals to people in their houses," he says. “Good quality food. It’s made from ingredients grown in the Boston area. They have their own test kitchen.”
[For more of this story, written by Dan Gorenstein, go to http://www.marketplace.org/top...e-money-saving-money]
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