With all the debate swirling about health care reform, I’ve been thinking a lot about our medical system, and the overall state of health in this country. Our bodies are sick, our system is sick, and it seems to me that we’re not talking or thinking enough about the relationship between those two facts. One thing I’d like to hear more about in this “public conversation” that’s going on right now is preventive care–if we paid more attention to keeping people healthy earlier in their lives, maybe our health care system wouldn’t be so overwhelmed.
To that end, I would like to present my own plan for health care reform–starting with you. Here’s what you can do right now, today, to keep your own body healthy–and isn’t that ultimately what the health care system is for?
1–Go see your doctor. Remember when you were a kid, how you went for check-ups and got shots and the doctor weighed you and measured you and tested your vision and hearing? Well, just because you grew up and your mom stopped making appointments for you doesn’t mean you don’t still need to keep tabs on all those things. Adults still need check-ups. While going to the doctor when you feel fine may seem counter-intuitive, it will keep you OUT of the doctor’s office in the long run. And if you don’t have a doctor, get one. If you need guidance in finding someone near you, the American Medical Association can help.
2–If you smoke, quit. Actually, let me rephrase that–if you use tobacco, quit. There is no safe way to use tobacco; whether you chew it or smoke it makes no difference. If you need help quitting, the American Lung Association is a good place to start. There is no up side to tobacco: it’ll kill you.
3–Lose the extra weight. I was going to qualify that; I first wrote “if you weigh too much,” but I realized that I know very few people who don’t weigh too much. Get naked and jump up and down in front of a mirror. If something jiggles that shouldn’t (and you know which parts should, if you think about it), you need to lose weight. If you insist on a more scientific way of figuring out how much you should weigh, check out this body mass index calculator (doctors consider BMI more accurate than weight, I think) or this ideal weight calculator. And be honest with yourself.
4–Go get some exercise. I don’t mean think about exercising, or plan to exercise, or put it on the list of things to do someday. I mean get up off your butt, walk away from the computer, and go work up a sweat. Then do it again tomorrow. If you’re afraid that exercising right now, right this very minute, will cause you to have a heart attack, pick up the phone and call your doctor; ask for a referral to a supervised exercise program that will get you moving safely. Just do it (swoosh).
5–Get a flu shot. I spent this morning at the urgent care; Toby got some hornet stings a couple of days ago, and insisted that he couldn’t get through a whole day of school without seeing a doctor. The office was overflowing with sick college kids; H1N1 is running rampant on all the college campuses around here. There’s not a vaccine for the swine flu yet, but it’s coming, and in the meantime, the CDC is recommending that we go ahead and get our seasonal flu shot out of the way. Have you ever had the flu? I’ve only had it once, but it was miserable. I don’t want it again. And people who have heart problems are considered to be at high risk for complications, so we all get our flu shot every year. Thirty thousand Americans die of the flu in a normal year. There’s no good reason not to get the shot.
That’s just a start; there are lots of things that we should all do, every day, to keep ourselves healthy. Ultimately, the only person responsible for your body is you.
*No, I don’t mean ensure, so don’t even think you get to call me up and correct my grammar, especially if you’re related to me. Insure stresses “the taking of necessary measures beforehand,” and that’s precisely what I mean. Prevention.