Healthy Lifestyles - Notes on Lifetime Fitness and Wellness | PFHW 163, Study notes of Community Health

Download Healthy Lifestyles - Notes on Lifetime Fitness and Wellness | PFHW 163 and more Study notes Community Health in PDF only on Docsity! Chapter 15 - Lifetime Fitness and Wellness Longevity After all of the discussions we have had this semester, you should have learned that by making good lifestyle choices, you can have better health, a higher quality of life and a longer life. What’s important to that is having a longer healthy life expectancy. Living to an old age but also feeling good, not sick. To make a healthy lifestyle choice, a person must execute his/her plan. With this plan must come a commitment and with that commitment comes many challenges. Hopefully, in this class, you have gained some important tools/skills to face these obstacles. If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to go to www.realage.com. At this site, you will fill out an assessment based on your lifestyle much like the HRA in class. At the end of the assessment, you will receive an email telling you what your chronological age is versus your physiological age. As the book states, there is often a variation in these 2 results mainly because of our lifestyle. Typically, sedentary people in the US are about 25 years older than their chronological age. The main point here is that a healthy lifestyle allows people to live a very healthy, vibrant life to at least age 95. Quackery/Fraud In today’s society, there is quite a bit of health quackery and fraud. The market has been saturated with various medications, quick fixes, and testimonials that “promise” to help remedy whatever illness you are experiencing. You can see these ads on T.V, magazine and newspaper advertisements. We need to be educated consumers of our own health. Basically, don’t believe everything that you hear. Now that we have the Internet, people are seeking health advice from unknown sources. Make sure that you do some research and find out if these are credible sources. Compare the site to other sites with similar information. Also watch out for people using medical jargon to sell their product. Other tips to protect yourself: 1. Seek the advice of a reputable professional. 2. Be on the alert for those who call themselves “experts” 3. Look for qualifications, degrees, certifications. 4. If it looks good too good to be true, it probably is. 5. Talk to friends, doctors, pharmacists for additional information. Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Many people today are seeking help in the realm of alternative medicine due to reasons such as a “cure” for their illness, disgust with their current doctor, rising health costs and testimonials from people using certain practices/products. Some people use CAM in conjunction with their current medical plan and others use it as a replacement. The book states that people who use CAM tend to be more educated and believe that body, mind and spirit all contribute to good health. That goes back to chapter 1 this semester covering all of the dimensions of wellness. CAM includes a lot of different areas such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, magnetic therapy and massage therapy. Many of these go back hundreds of years. Make sure that you read the “shortcomings” for CAM in chapter 15 before trying some of these different practices.