How to Make Personal Control of One’s Health 【L31】________should take charge of their health. The single greatest threat to heal

Good morning. I’m Dr Pat Plant, and I’m here to talk to you about preventative medicine in its widest and most personal aspects. In other words, I’m here to tell you how the patients should wrest control of their health away from the practitioners of medicine and take charge of their own medical destiny. I want to talk about staying out of the hands of the doctor.
When a patient takes responsibility for her or his own health — and let’s decide the patient is male for now — men are in fact more at risk than women anyway. When the patient takes over his own health regime, he must decide what he wants to do. The first thing, of course, is to give up the demon nicotine. Smoking is the worst threat to health, and it’s self-inflicted damage. I have colleagues who are reluctant to treat smokers. If you want to stay well, stay off tobacco and smoking in all its manifestation. Our department has recently completed a survey of men’s health. We looked at men in different age groups and occupations, and we came up with a disturbing insight. Young men, particularly working-class men, are at considerable risk of premature death because of their lifestyle. As a group, they have high-risk factors: they drink too much alcohol, they smoke more heavily than any other group, their diet is frequently heavy in saturated fats, and they don’t get enough exercise.
We did a smaller survey in which we looked at environmental factors which affect health. I had privately expected to find air or water pollution to be the biggest hazards, and they must not be ignored. However, the effects of the sun emerged as a threat which people simply do not take sufficiently seriously. Please remember that too much sunlight can cause permanent damage.
Given this information, and the self-destructive things which people, particularly young men, are doing to themselves, one could be excused for feeling very depressed. However, I believe that a well-funded education campaign will help us improve public health standards and will be particularly valuable for young men. I’m an optimist. I see things improving, but only if things that you as students can do to improve your fitness.
So now I’d like to issue a qualification for everything I say. People will still get sick, and they will still need doctors. This advice is just to reduce the incidence of sickness — it would be great if disease was preventable, but it’s not. However, we have power.
In the late 1980s, the Surgeon-General of the United States said that 53% of our illnesses could be avoided by healthy lifestyle choices. I now want to discuss these choices with you.
You should try to make keeping fit fun! It’s very hard to go out and do exercise by yourself, so it’s wise to find a sport that you like and do it with other people. If you swim, you can consider scuba diving or snorkelling. If you jog, try to find a friend to go with. If you walk, choose pretty places to walk or have a reason for walking. Your exercise regime should be a pleasure, not a penance. The university is an excellent place to find other people who share sporting interests with you, and there are many sports teams you can join. This unfortunately raises the issue of sports injuries, and different sports have characteristic injuries. As well as accidental injuries, we find repetitive strain injuries occurring in sports where the same motion is frequently performed, like rowing and squash. The parallel in working life is repetitive strain injury which may be suffered by typists or other people who perform the same action hour after hour, day after day.
In this context, therefore, the most important thing to remember before any sport is to warm up adequately. Do stretching exercises, and aim at all times to increase your flexibility. Be gentle with yourself, and allow time to prepare for the game you have chosen to play. Don’t be fooled by the term ’warm up’, by the way. It’s every bit ’as important to do your warm-up exercise on a hot day as on a cool one.
I think one of the recognition is that all sports can borrow from each other. Many sports programmes are now encouraging players to use cross training techniques, that is to borrow training techniques from other sports. Boxers have been using cross training for years: building up stamina by doing road work and weight training, while honing their skills and reflexes. Other sports which require a high level of eye-hand coordination are following this trend, so you see table tennis players running and jogging to improve their performance, and football is doing flexibility exercises which can help them control the ball better. All of these results are good, but the general sense of well-being is best, and is accessible to us all, from trained athletes to people who will never run a hundred meters in less than 15 seconds. Good health is not only for those who will achieve athletic greatness!