PRIMARY HEALTH CARE

Health Blogarithm for the 15th of December 2009

Primary health care should be the care and attention you give to yourself to keep fit and healthy. In an affluent and well-educated society this should not be a burden for the great majority of people.

Whether it be the metabolic, musculo-skeletal or psychological dysfunctions, small problems can often be solved easily by a good physical training regime.

You feel schidhouse, you start training. Pretty soon you'll experience the exercise-led recovery. You feel better. You sleep better. Your trousers fit better; you don't feel like they're ring-barking you.

Secondary health care is the advice you get from teachers and therapists of one sort or another that gets you back on track to restoring poor health to good.

The original meaning of the word 'doctor' was 'teacher'. It now means 'prescriber'. Based on their recent track record, you're going to get much better advice about how to keep yourself fit and healthy from a fitness practitioner, naturopath or life coach than you are from a doctor.

In fact people need to be encouraged to leave consultations with their GP to serious medical complaints, rather than flooding surgeries with things that GP's are notoriously bad at fixing, and at best resort to patching over.

The qualifications to dispense some of this advice need not be very high. For a lot of it, a TAFE qualification would be sufficient. A nursing qualification is quite sufficient for many procedures. They've got the tools, let them get on with the job. A fitness practitioner with a couple of years under their belt knows vastly more about exercise than your average doctor and how to prescribe that exercise. A naturopath can tell you what you need to eat more of and what you need to eat less of. We're not talking rocket science here.

We over rate the level of advice people need to keep themselves in good shape and fix up niggling complaints. The medical profession certainly doesn't have a mortgage on the provision of that advice.

There a lot of experts in the health and fitness game that don't work in a surgery.

Tertiary health care is, of course the care you need from the medical profession when you've given the first two your best shot and haven't succeeded in restoring your body to good health. Most people don't know this. Their first port of call is the doctor. They get sucked into the pharmaceutical vortex. They end up like the man named Charlie who went for a ride on the Boston MTA and never returned!

'Well, did he ever return? No, he never returned and his fate is still unknown. He may ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston. He's the man who never returned.'

Workout
A 40 minute, 200 aerabyte workout on the stepper in the morning and a very good strength training session in the gym. Have found a new exercise to loosen up my left buttock and I'll get it drawn up in a few days. I think my tight left bottuck is the cause of my sore right Achilles tendon. Someone said I may need an orthotic. I'll report back.

Weight: 86.2 kg - I'm heading in the right direction.

In the mean time stay tuned, highly tuned and look after your Self.

John Miller
http://www.fitandhealthyonline.com/

Labels: primary health care, fix back pain, strength training diary, aerabyte, aerobic fitness diary