Medical Diseases

[?] Subscribe To This Site

Medical Diseases

How To Die Of Old Age, Not Medical Diseases

How is it that as technology advances and new inventions are created to make life easier, more people in the developed world are dying of cancer, heart disease and stroke every year?

The key lies in a lack of Awareness and Action. More people need to know about the links between the lifestyles they lead and how these affect their bodies. But knowledge is nothing if it is not applied. There needs to be the additional effort of acting on the knowledge to make the tough but necessary lifestyle changes that will halt preventable lifestyle-related medical diseases and put our overtaxed bodies back on the path to health and wellness.

Creating Awareness about Medical Diseases

Let's talk about cholesterol.

Cholesterol is one of the fats in the blood and can lead to serious health problems such as heart disease and stroke. Yet how many people actually know this? We may vaguely "know of" good and bad cholesterol from what we read or hear about in the news, but not many of us will make the connection between what we are eating now on a daily basis and the disease that erupts years down the road. Even fewer will do something about this connection.

According to the Director of the Heart and Vascular Division at The George Institute for International Health, Associate Professor Bruce Neal, many Australians do not fully appreciate the health risks caused by cholesterol. If they did, many deaths could be prevented.

The good news is that high cholesterol is a problem that is preventable and treatable with a better diet, more exercise and (for some) medication. Unfortunately, most people are not even aware that they may be at risk of cholesterol-related health problems, and do not get their cholesterol levels checked regularly.

What can we do to educate ourselves on disease prevention and healthy living?

For a start, we can read more. The Internet has incredible amounts of useful information from reliable, respected sources such as regulatory websites and medical research websites. Health magazines often carry short, easy-to-digest articles on the latest health and research findings. The library is a free resource for specialized and general health topics. That is where my husband and I chanced upon Dr. Sandra Cabot's wonderfully readable yet highly informative books on the Liver Cleansing Diet, weight loss and cholesterol.

Secondly, we must take greater responsibility for our health.

Doctors treat symptoms; they have neither the resources nor the interest to help you discover what is at the root of your particular ailment. You and I have to assume that responsibility ourselves by being conscious of what is going into our bodies each day. We need to ask more questions about the food we eat, our drinking water, the air we breathe, the personal care products we slap on our faces and skin, the household cleaning solutions we use. All of these things potentially contain toxins and chemicals that are damaging to our long-term health because they create toxin build-up in our bodies.