Public Health

A healthy life does start with a happy life. Let’s face it when one is happy there is no stress and better yet no complications to our lives. We live in a society that is going a hundred miles per hour and seems to never stop to refuel.

Having a happy life starts with making your surroundings enjoyable and your abode a pleasant place to live in. When we come home from work we want to kick off our shoes and place ourselves in a relaxing state. If your surroundings are messy then it is hard to relax. A clean quiet room is the place to start to relax.

After you sit back and are relaxing and feeling calmed from the days work or activities it is time to think of a place that makes you happy. Be it a field of daisies or a swimming pool floating on a raft. Making you feel happy and relaxed is a crucial part to a healthy life.

In a healthy life, relaxing and meditation can be a part of you day, even at work. You can sit back in your chair and think of your relaxing place. At times doing this technique several times a day you will find you are able to deal with the work stresses in a better manner. Becoming irate toward others just makes your day bad as well as theirs.

In conclusion it does not cost you anything to relax and think of a calm place to be. Just take a bit of time in your busy schedule to do this and soon your days will be more at an even keel. You will find that you are calmer when you are faced with hectic problems!

Isn’t it good health one of our priorities in the family among other things? With that in mind, would not it be very comforting to know also if the community where we live in also promotes public health nursing? Even if your eyebrows meet and your forehead carries a large question mark because you don’t know exactly it means and what it can do to your community, but if you read it between the lines, I am sure you would say yes right away!

But, what really is public health nursing? For some, the words may sound familiar, while others may find the words confusing. Actually, this is the practice of upholding and protecting the health of the community by using the knowledge learned from nursing, social, and social health sciences. Given the good intention of general health task, it is not surprising to know that you can find social health nursing almost anywhere in the country.

In fact, developed to describe its specific roles and to provide a guide for health nursing practice in the ever growing health care system. However, the social health nursing practice can be affected by certain factors, such as environmental, biological, cultural, economic, social and political aspects of a community. Due to the fact that public health nursing is an integral part of the healthcare system, the former is also responsive to these factors by way of working with the community in promoting health and preventing disease, injury and disability.

As public health nurses, their role is to integrate community health involvement and knowledge about the entire community with personal and clinical understandings of the health and illness experiences of individuals and families within the community. Also, they interpret and express the health and illness experiences of different, usually vulnerable individuals and families in the community to health planners and policy makers and assist members of the community to speak up their problems and hopes.

They may be carried out even by only one public health nurse or by a group of public health nurses working together for the same purpose. There could be many activities that public health nurses can do in order to promote good health and protect the health of the entire community. One of the best examples is providing health education, care management and primary care to the people and families, especially those who are members of vulnerable community.

Our world could be a better place to live in if only all the community encourage public health nursing in order to have disease-free and health-conscious family. And since family is the smallest unit of a community, the awareness in promoting health should start within it. This is much easier to achieve through the help of public health nurses, knowing that it only takes one public health nurse to operate a public health nursing.

In general healthy life expectancy has increased due to several factors of out lifestyle. During the span of the 20th century, average life expectancy jumped from around 49 years of age in 1901 up to 77 years by the century’s end.

The center for Disease Control and Prevention gives the following as the big reasons for our increased healthy life expectancy:

Vaccination

Improvements in motor-vehicle safety

Workplace Safety

Better infectious diseases control

Decline in deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke

Safer and healthier foods

Healthier mothers and babies

Family planning

Fluoridation of drinking water

Recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard

Another factor contributing to the increase of average life span has been the drastic reduction in infant mortality rate.

The biggest piece of the life expectancy puzzle missing from their list is the ability to remain free from illness and disease. Modern medicine has become very involved with developing methods to mask symptoms and thus prolong our ability to live with a condition, which has contributed some to increased longevity. However, the person still has the root cause of the illness or disease. And most of the time there are side affects of the treatment the patient must live with, stated as a lesser suffering than the original symptom. The question becomes, is their quality of life actually improved when new symptoms from the treatment are then needed to be treated, it’s more like the symptoms are just transfered and altered but not eliminated. This is because the cause has not been altered.

Remaining healthy is the greatest quality of life and anti-aging strategy that can even increase your healthy life expectancy. Imagine if you were healthy enough not to get seriously sick you would not need to get involved with taking drugs and medicines that many times cause more additional unwanted symptoms that the initial ones. And once on these drugs you are likely never off of them because they don’t actually alter anything that supports the real cause. Doesn’t it make you wonder why our huge medical resources are not applied to stopping or preventing the cause?

There is a school of thought that focuses on the root cause and questions why disease has been allowed to take hold in the body at all. If the body’s immune system is functioning properly, disease should not occur. It is thought that the only way for a disease to take hold is for the body to be in some sort of state that is less than optimal or as it should be. Standard medical therapies such as drugs, surgery, and chemotherapy help mask and even diminish the symptoms but the causative condition is really still there. A surgeon can remove a tumor, but the reason the tumor grew in the first place is not addressed. Through this medical process we have been led to believe that treating an illness or disease is a complicated process that takes time and of course lots of money. But what is usually going on is the masking of symptoms rather than a cure, nor restoration to a state of wellness.

In order to look at enhancing prevention of illness and disease we must change our focus from treating to wellness. Treatment is done after something has happened, wellness keeps it from happening. Actually focusing on wellness can also better serve curing or healing what has occurred better than treating the symptoms because it aims to restore the core cause to a desired healthy state rather than just masking symptoms.

Studies have shown that the problem is at the cellular level where the bodies cells are designed to perform many functions, as long as they are healthy. Two things happen which both work against you. Disease can only thrive in the kind an internal environment that is also not good for your cells. So, your body is in a weakened state and the disease is thriving. Plus, your immune system is weaker too and less able to fight off the disease. When in this condition it is very common for multiple problems to exist at the same time making the immune system choose what to focus it’s reduced abilities on.

While all the areas of life expectancy improvement listed above are important the greatest factor knocking us down is still our general health. If your body is truly healthy and able to do it’s job, it would not be normal to be taking medicine every day, rather an exception. And many would not spend years living with a restricted lifestyle because of debilitating ailments. Doing all you can to enhance your overall wellness is key to quality of life and longevity.