Helping yourself to Good Health
How to take responsibility for preventing illness to stay healthy
It is a simple fact that when it comes to managing a chronic illness, the most important person (and the one who has to play the most active part in keeping the disease under control) is the person who has that illness. We as doctors can examine, advise and prescribe – but it is the individual who has to live with himself or herself 24/7 and so is in the best position to manage the disease. Unlike acute infections and injuries, where the condition can be cured and the patient returned to the “pre-illness” level of normality, long term illnesses such as high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary heart disease and asthma cannot be cured. Once you get it, the disease has to be managed and kept under control. So while doctors can diagnose, educate and support their patients, it is important that patients themselves accept responsibility for their own health and well being.
It must be realised that the Patient is like a player – like Roger Federer and Venus Williams, like Sanath Jayasuriya, Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting – and whether it comes to tennis, cricket or the management of diabetes, it is the player who is in the middle and has to perform. Of course every successful player needs an efficient coach, and this is the role of today's family physician, to be the coach cum manager of a healthy "patient". Just as a sports coach might call on other professionals - a specialist fielding coach or sports psychologist or physiotherapist who can assist and advise the player by virtue of special skills which the chief coach may not possess - a good family physician should be able to call on dieticians, psychologists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, nurses, specialist doctors and others for assistance and advice.
Many of the diseases we get as we become older can be termed Diseases of Choice – conditions developed as a result of the lifestyle and habits we choose to follow. Eating more food than required and allowing the extra calories to accumulate around the waist, flooding the bloodstream with more alcohol than is good and pickling the liver, leading an entirely sedentary life and not doing any physical exercise, regularly filling both lungs with noxious cigarette smoke – all these are choices that one makes, which inevitably result in diseases that shortens life and also limits the choices one can make in later life.
We cannot predict what illnesses will befall us - deadly conditions like cancer and accidents can strike out of the blue, and there is precious little that we can do. But we can certainly minimise the chances of getting some of the 21st century’s major killer diseases by adhering to a sensible lifestyle. Even if we do develop “incurable” diseases like high blood pressure, ischaemic heart disease and diabetes, we can prevent the adverse long term effects of these diseases by adhering to our coaches’ advice.
Even the best coach in the world cannot help a talented player if the player ignores the coach’s advice and chooses instead to bat or pitch or swing their racquet any old way that they want! Similarly, the best doctor in the world cannot effectively manage a patient’s disease if the patient chooses to eat and drink and smoke what they want - and persist in taking their tablets haphazardly or not at all!
After all, it is not having the best doctor in town - or even the best medicines that money can buy - that makes the difference. It is sensibly following one's doctor’s advice and conscientiously taking the medicines that one is prescribed that makes the difference!
