Chronic Disease and Lifestyle
Being and staying healthy, chronic disease and lifestyle Staying healthy is harder than avoiding the lifestyle and psychological habits that contribute to and/or cause disease. Primary prevention of chronic diseases is more challenging than primary prevention of infectious diseases because it requires changing health behaviours. The awareness to know one’s human strengths and weaknesses and to understand the impact of one’s actions for one’s health requires supported self-education. Efforts to change deep-rooted and often culturally influenced patterns of behaviours, such as diet, alcohol and tobacco use, and physical inactivity, generally have been less successful than environmental health and immunisation programs (perhaps substantially through lack of resources).
Staying healthy and preventing disease requires the development of personal responsibility. The concept of self-care requires a daily conscious focus on one’s physical, mental and emotional state and the ability to take corrective action whenever imbalance is sensed. When one cannot correct the imbalance or when the condition is more serious, one might consult a practitioner as a guide to understanding the situation and arraying options, rather than as a technical expert expected to ‘fix’ it.
