Opinion: Why science-led self-care is good for our health

The past two centuries have seen enormous changes in the management of health and wellness, helping people lead healthier lives.

The rapid advancement of science and innovation has greatly increased our understanding of how the human body works, as well as available tools to improve health conditions and fight diseases. Each of these advancements has helped to remove previous barriers to improve health, but with many health care systems around the world desperately underfunded, access to consultations with — and medications prescribed by — a health care practitioner is not guaranteed for everyone.

In contrast, self-care is about empowering the consumer to look after their health and well-being, and making health care understandable and accessible to all. Self-care, the ability for people to take more control over their own health, offers an approach to help level the playing field in terms of access to health care. Across the world, many people have better access to retail health stores, such as pharmacies, than to a traditional health care provider.

Expanding access to and trust in self-care may also relieve some of the pressure on overburdened traditional health care systems by taking minor ailments out of the clinic and boosting baseline health and nutrition at a population level: Supporting consumers to maintain their own health can help to reduce the risk of future illness and frailty.

Pharmacists are an important component of self-care, providing advice and support to the consumer — but ultimately, self-care involves consumers making health and wellness decisions for themselves. This means that clear information and credible, effective options must be available. Although self-care has become synonymous with the health and wellness industry, many products promoted for self-care are not grounded in deep science or evidence, and the term self-care is not focused on disease prevention or on keeping and staying healthy. Gaps in understanding unmet medical needs and declining trust in science present additional problems for consumers trying to identify the best solutions to manage their health.

The five core principles

We argue that trust and credibility, founded on transparent science, hold the key to addressing these challenges and helping consumers to identify effective and credible self-care solutions. Applying a few core principles to developing science-led self-care can help empower more people to take control of their daily health and wellness needs.

The Science of the Human is rooted in an understanding of both human biology and credible medical insights. It also includes an understanding of unmet human needs, which can be recognized and responded to by the consumer. Taking this approach aims to deliver true medical benefits, as well as ensuring product safety, and can lead to substantial innovations. Emerging science around microbiomes is building a growing understanding of how variations in microbial flora among different populations can impact health and treatment. Likewise, experts at Bayer recently identified an approach that could help address opioid overprescribing, by using an over-the-counter pain reliever to reduce pain associated with dental procedures. All of this points to the need to first start with the principle of understanding human needs.

The Science of Regulation is about an understanding of and ability to navigate the regulatory frameworks surrounding self-care products. Its importance in the self-care industry should not be underplayed. It’s critical that regulation is fit for purpose and keeps pace with the rate of innovation in an industry that’s continually evolving. But it also links to access to self-care solutions. The Self-Care Readiness Index pointed to the regulatory environment as a key enabler to helping ensure increased and equitable access to self-care around the world.

The rapid innovation in self-care is driven by the Science of Discovery and the Science of Collaboration — in fact, we believe the best ideas come from great minds thinking together. Even large, global, deeply scientific companies don’t have all the answers. For example, Bayer has a strong network of external partners with varying areas of expertise, such as universities conducting groundbreaking research to help improve our understanding of health challenges. And partnering with companies innovating in new and exciting ways helps find applications for that research. Carefully judged collaborations can help improve access to self-care, making products available more widely and empowering more consumers to take charge of their health.

Finally, self-care revolves around the consumer interacting with products and services. A self-care product that a consumer can’t or doesn’t want to use is a waste. The Science of the Consumer-Product Experience is growing more and more complex — it’s not just about the experience of taking the product from a shelf in the store and using it. Increasingly, the full personal health journey of every consumer is being improved — from the information brought up by internet searches at the beginning, through selecting a product, to providing personalized programs of supplements to your door. The end goal, as always, is making health care as easy and accessible as possible.

In order to effectively level the playing field in terms of access to health care around the world, it’s important that the available options are credible, rigorously developed, and effectively address a true medical and human need. This is why we feel it’s important to combine all these principles. We need to keep pushing boundaries with scientific discovery and innovation, but these must be based not only on a deep understanding of human biology but also of consumers’ needs and experience. And all this should be underpinned by a regulatory process that is fit for purpose and enables broad access to self-care products to empower consumers to manage their health and well-being.

What next?

We feel that widespread adoption of these principles can benefit others in the industry who are committed to continuing the journey of people living better, healthier lives, but we also view this as the start of an ongoing conversation. We are looking forward to hearing from other stakeholders in the self-care industry about how we can grow and evolve these over time.

For more information about the Science of Self-Care, please visit http://www.bayer.com/en/personal-health/science-led-self-care.