Unless you are a highly motivated medical professional excited about your career or an expectant parent, hospitals can be pretty depressing for almost everyone else.

For fitness enthusiasts or sport-oriented people in good health, hospitals are perhaps an even stranger place to be.

From the gym or club, surrounded by fit athletes in the prime of their lives, to the ward where patients are struck down by some affliction or other, it is all a sobering reminder of our fragility and mortality.

When we consider the general treatment and management of diseases and conditions, it is only normal, though not necessarily natural, to think about pills and medicines. Advances in the medical sciences have, of course, provided a vast range of medications painstakingly engineered to successfully treat and cure various health challenges.

In the US alone, it has been reported that $350 billion are spent on prescription medications every year. It can only be something positive, however, that those most entrusted with the important role of safeguarding our health are now also considering advances made in other areas too.

The exercise sciences represent one such area that has taken several steps of its own, and exercise itself is now being considered as a method of management and treatment of medical conditions alongside other means, be they traditionally associated with medicine or not. Saving the requirement for highly specialised guidance or supervision, exercise for the most part is free and makes perfect economic sense when taking into account how much governments around the world spend on their healthcare systems.

We began seeing exercise featured in clinical trials some time ago when it was first compared to anti-depressant medications in the treatment of mental illnesses – where it was found to be as just effective as some other popular medications.

Back in 2012, a paper published in the British Journal of Pharmacology suggested that the effects of exercise are so potent that it may actually be considered a psychoactive drug, right down to the fact that care should be taken in setting the right dosage, and too much of it can even become addictive.

If you are looking to improve your general health, remember that exercise works best when combined with other positive lifestyle habits

The medicinal properties of exercise are now firmly under the microscope, as research into other conditions now also appears to be stacking it up there as a legitimate contender alongside other medications. We also know it helps reduce certain inflammatory proteins linked to chronic illnesses including dementia and arthritis.

Most recently, more interesting research has started to emerge specifically from universities in Canada and Australia about how exercise can help fight one of medicine’s most devastating opponents.

Detracting nothing from the gravity of the situation, it is with frightening frequency that the ‘C word’ tends to crop up these days in discussions on ill health. I am, of course, talking about the Friday the 13th of modern illnesses: cancer. It rears its ugly head in so many shapes and forms, some more aggressively deadly than others. It does not discriminate and can strike you down without warning, whoever you are and in cases where you never even thought it possible.

We hear stories of people who have lived religiously healthy lives, avoiding all the common lifestyle pitfalls, yet still developing some forms of the disease for no apparent reason. While this is unfortunately true, the figures still consistently tie a number of unhealthy lifestyle factors with increased risk of developing cancer. So while it can indeed happen to us all, we are left with one pertinent question: if you could reduce your risk of contracting the disease even if only slightly, would you?

Whether it is performed as a prevention or cure, it seems exercise as a solution has just become even more viable. Following several studies in the area, researchers at the University of Montreal have suggested that exercise is an effective treatment of prostate cancer, even in advanced stages of the disease, serving to significantly extend life expectancy rates. This indeed forms the basic hypothesis underlying a large-scale study to be conducted in the near future across 60 hospitals in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Holland and Australia.

Over 900 male prostate cancer patients are being recruited with a view to being placed in several groups, one of which will involve the use of exercise under the supervision of exercise specialists, as a supplement to the standard treatment plan. More comprehensive results are therefore expected very soon about how cost-effective methods like exercise can provide very real and measurable benefits in clinical settings for conditions as deadly as cancer.

The positive effects of exercise as treatment of developing heart disease are already well documented due to the known effects of cardiovascular activity, including strengthening of the heart muscle and improvement of blood pressure and cholesterol levels. When more data becomes available from the upcoming cancer trials, we could see more investigations into the efficacy of fitness as a drug for other conditions and diseases too.

In the meantime, if you are looking to improve your general health, remember that exercise works best when combined with other positive lifestyle habits. Consider better health to be as simple as A, B and C.

Activity in the gym or interspersed evenly throughout the day will furnish you with the numerous benefits of exercise. Eat a balanced diet high in fruits and vegetables and low in sugar and processed foods and chill out to safeguard your psychological well-being and ward off stress.

matthew.muscat.inglott@mcast.edu.mt

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