Before we talk about “good health” let`s look at someone who is not in good health-Bill, a forty-five-year-old business-equipment salesman who is in the hospital recovering from his first heart attack. Bill is typical of many men in our culture who have spent much of their life pursuing the American dream.
But Bill`s future is not assured; in fact, his physician has told him that he has quite a considerable chance of suffering another, potentially fatal, heart attack. As she has noted, Bill`s family history contains genetic risk factors (his father died of heart disease when he was fifty-five). Environmental risk factors have also increased Bill`s chances of developing heart disease, since he lives and works in a city with high levels of air pollution. And his chance of heart disease has also been increased by a number of lifestyle risk factors – factors that she now recommends he try to minimize by making some big changes in his everyday living habits.
- Like most of us, Bill never considered the possibility of having a heart attack. Even though he has put on a good deal of extra weight over the years-much of it trough business entertaining, which is an important part of his job-he thinks of himself as vigorous and “in good shape for a guy his age”. Now, however, his physician has advised him to lose at least 10 pounds over them next two months and to begin exercising regularly.- Smoking at least one pack of cigarettes a day has been part of Bill`s lifestyle for the last twenty years. He thinks that smoking helps him relax, gets him going in the morning, and makes meals taste better-and, besides, all his friends smoke. Now his physician has advised him to stop smoking immediately.
- Drinking fairly heavily with friends and at meals with clients has been pleasurable for Bill, and it has helped him “fit in”. Now, however, he has been advised to cut down his alcohol consumption drastically.
- Bill`s life, with its long hours on the road and its high-pressure selling situations, has contained much of the stress that our society associates with the quest of success. This stress has not all been negative: Like other good salesman, Bill thrives under pressure, and he has been energized by the push to make sales quotas and reach company goals. But now he has been advised to reduce the stress in his life.
What would you do if you were Bill? Put yourself in his position : Would you be able to make all the changes the physician has so persuasively recommended-and if you did, would you be healthy then? How will Bill feel if the changes the lifestyle from which he has derived so much satisfaction for the past twenty years? In the physical sense, it is clear that he will indeed be healthier. But what about his emotional health, and what about the social aspects of his life? If Bill can`t function as well as he has in the past in his job or among his friends and colleagues, he will be upset; his family will feel the strain, too. Bill`s problem is not an easy one to solve. Health for him includes many different aspects, and physical health is only one; he is also concerned with how he sees himself and how he thinks others see him. He is a complex creature, as all of us are, and limiting our attention to his physical problems greatly oversimplifies his heart attack.
As Bill case shows, health is quality that involves the psychological and social dimensions of our lives, as well as the greatest possible freedom from physical infirmities and disease. Hundreds of years ago, the word “health” meant “whole-th” or “wholeness”, in our language; today, when health professionals speak of health, they mean the whole person. As the World Health Organization stated in its 1947 charter, health is “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absense of disease or infirmity”. It`s having all the parts of your life fit together in a way that is comfortable for you, so that you can function effectively from day to day.
Reference :
Marvin R Levy, Mark Dignan, Janet H Shirreffs, Essentials of Life & Health, Fourth Edition, Random House, New York, 1984.
