- Actor and icon LeVar Burton is encouraging people to make appointments with their doctor to get life-saving health screenings they might have put on the back burner during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- An estimated 41 percent of adults in the United States delayed or avoided medical care shortly after the pandemic began.
- Experts are concerned that pandemic-era screening delays for various types of cancer will account for excess deaths over the next decade unless changes are made.
Actor, director and popular television host LeVar Burton recalls watching his mother deal with what he calls a “cascading effect of conditions” before her death. Burton’s mother lived with diabetes and heart disease and he saw her “vitality sort of begin to ebb away,” missing needed appointments with healthcare professionals she wasn’t always in contact with enough.
“I was processing — as we do when we face a loss like that in our lives — I came to a conclusion that had she been of the mind to really make those [healthcare] visits with her team a priority, it would have given her not only more time, but a better quality of life at the end,” Burton told Healthline.
Burton’s memories of his mother and her health struggles have been on his mind a lot lately as he reflects back on the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic and lessons he’s drawn about his own approach to his overall health and wellbeing.
Today, Burton is leveraging his celebrity as an iconic actor of “Roots” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fame and celebrated children’s TV host of “Reading Rainbow” to remind people to prioritize their health and get back to their doctors’ offices.
The goal is to make sure people get back to some of the needed, life-saving health screenings they might have put on the back burner during a year-and-a-half of shelter-at-home orders and COVID-19 lockdowns.
“I think at the end of the day, we all have to decide to put our life vests on before we try and help others, and I’m just going to point out that I am at an age in my life where I’m really looking at my responsibility to the people around me and how staying as healthy as I can is an integral part of that,” Burton added.
“One of the takeaways from the COVID lockdown for me was the need and necessity to take care of myself and I felt I was on a trajectory that was unsustainable in terms of the pace at which I was living,” he explained. “Lockdown was an opportunity for me to really look at my life and make some hard decisions about the quality of life that I wanted to enjoy going forward.”
Source: healthline