Start exercise, doctor’s orders

Get on a bus, walk through a public square, or peruse the shops. Catch drifts of conversations occurring around you, and before long you’ll probably catch the phrase: “…in this world of today”, or something along those lines.

It could be the rising prices, the loss of personal interaction, dying values or the behaviour of the up-and-coming generation. Or it could be the rise of limitless technological possibilities, the fountains of knowledge available instantaneously at our fingertips or the shrinking of the global village. We all know the world is changing. Whether it’s for better or worse, I guess that’s all down to whose conversations you happen to catch.

But what of our health and wellness? What on earth is going on there? We seem to know a lot more about exercise and all its associated benefits than our grandparents did; indeed, more people are exercising all over the civilised world. We know this for a fact, because statistics tell us so, but statistics also paint other more morbid stories.

More sharply, rising figures tell us obesity is also on the rise, and so is the use of medication. So in a world where we know so much about pretty much anything, including health, how can we be getting fatter and sicker?

The experts are on the case. In a recent paper by the American Heart Association, Bonnie Spring of the Northwestern University in Chicago cited physical inactivity as a major contributing factor to modern-day, poor health alongside smoking, obesity and bad eating habits.

So according to what the experts are saying, being physically lazy has actually become as bad for our health as smoking or eating too much junk food. All these unhealthy behaviours combined are having a devastating effect on healthcare costs the world over, and policy-makers are taking note. Something needs to be done, because whatever we’ve tried so far hasn’t done the trick just yet.

It would seem healthcare itself is experiencing a paradigm shift. When we feel aches, pains or discomforts of some sort, we enroll into the healthcare system and undergo all the relevant tests. A blood pressure reading or even a more in-depth blood test may flag certain problems that can then be duly treated as required.

But what if the test results leave us empty-handed? What if no identifiable problems as yet exist? This doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t on their way. It could just be a matter of time before the entire process is repeated, and treatable conditions actually crop up. This all sounds quite expensive, so is it really necessary?

The American Heart Association for one is asking the question: why can’t we treat the real causes before they turn into serious problems? Unhealthy lifestyle factors should be treated with as much importance as a bad test result, if not more, because we’re still in time to actually do something about it. Since we can’t, really accurately, see the results of those behaviours just yet, it doesn’t mean they’re not causing us harm – which will eventually show up on a test result anyway.

The effects of unhealthy habits tend to creep up on us slowly. Indeed, heart disease is often referred to as the silent killer. This paradigm shift might be sugar-coated with scientific jargon when the experts speak and write about it; however, it can all be traced back to a very fundamental and well-known doctrine that looks a lot more like common sense to most of us: prevention is better than cure.

So where does exercise fit in? One thing we can bank on in the near future is the increased promotion of physical activity as a cure for those in whom the healthcare system flags physical inactivity as a risk factor.

Exercise has fast become a viable method of treatment in the healthcare system, with far more people being advised by their doctors to pursue active lifestyles than they were perhaps 20 years ago. Not only is it now an affective prescription option for doctors, but some experts have investigated the potential effectiveness of exercise as a replacement altogether for some popular medications.

If you had any doubts about how seriously this notion is taken in academic circles, then a particular study, carried out jointly by Harvard and Stanford Universities, as well as the London School of Economics, might convince you otherwise.

The fact that such institutions felt the need to investigate the possibility of replacing some drugs with exercise in the first place speaks volumes in itself; however, even more fascinating are the results themselves.

The study investigates secondary prevention, which means managing diseases before they become serious illnesses or debilitating conditions. They looked at coronary heart disease, rehabilitation of stroke, treatment of heart failure and prevention of diabetes in over 330,000 participants involved in the study. The researchers concluded that while more trials would be needed in the future, exercise is potentially as effective as many drug interventions currently used for these conditions.

One definite conclusion drawn by the researchers was that patients being treated with medications known to produce only moderate effects certainly have the right to be educated about the possible benefits to be gained from indulging in an exercise programme as a viable form of additional, or even alternative, treatment.

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