Category: What is health

The environment describes all external factors that affect us – thus environmental health is the idea that these factors can influence our health, for better or worse. There is the social environment, or the people around us, and the physical environment, or all external physical factors that affects us. This can be the air we breathe, the water we drink, the neighborhoods we live in, and even the laws and policies that structure our lives.

How can a neighborhood impact our health? Try this interactive activity to find out – https://unnaturalcauses.org/interactivities_03.php. Do you live in a healthy neighborhood? New York City has been surveying and writing about its neighborhoods for several years – looks up yours here.

The kinds of toxins and pathogens we are exposed to may be a product of our environment. That is, if we live in cities with higher air pollution, or geographic locations where certain animals that carry diseases proliferate, we may be more likely exposed to these diseases. For example, you can look at maps of where cases of West Nile virus happen here – https://wwwn.cdc.gov/arbonet/Maps/ADB_Diseases_Map/index.html

Other environmental factors are built environment – roads, buildings, parks, and so on. Things like availability of bike lanes may help people reach their recommended levels of physical activity. Other things like the presence of lead paint in a home with small children can be detrimental to people’s health – the NYC report on lead levels is here https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/lead/lead-quarterly-report.pdf

One view of medical care is that if something is wrong, you can go to the doctor to get better. The medical definition of health is often just the absence of a particular disease.

However, there is another view of health and wellness – this is the view that sees wellness as a combination of several dimensions, and sees the interaction of the person and their environment. In this view, we not only want to cure an illness, we want to prevent it from happening if possible.

We can think of prevention as a behavior that eliminates or lowers the chances that a disease will happen in the first place (primary), or behaviors that lead to a disease being discovered early and thus treated early (secondary).

Examples of primary prevention are vaccination, wearing condoms, putting on sunscreen and hand washing. Examples of secondary prevention are Pap smears, mammograms, and other screening tests.

Here are a few more ideas for preventing disease – https://www.nih.gov/health-information/disease-prevention-toolkit.

What are some of the most common behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of death? And is there anything we can do to change our likelihood of death from a particular cause?

The behaviors that are responsible for most deaths in the United States are: using tobacco, a sedentary lifestyle and an unhealthy diet.

Health behaviors are considered to be modifiable determinants of health – that is, you can change them! But how can people change these common behaviors? The field of health education uses several theories to explain the process of making behavior change.
• Health belief model – http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/SB/BehavioralChangeTheories/BehavioralChangeTheories2.html
• Theory of planned behavior – http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/SB/BehavioralChangeTheories/BehavioralChangeTheories3.html
• Social cognitive theory – http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/SB/BehavioralChangeTheories/BehavioralChangeTheories5.html
• Transtheoretical model or Stages of Change – http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/SB/BehavioralChangeTheories/BehavioralChangeTheories6.html

Our government and many health-related organizations put together a plan every 10 years to improve the health of the nation. This decade’s plan is called HealthyPeople 2020 – https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/About-Healthy-People

Some of the broad areas that Healthy People 2020 focuses on are:

• Reducing or eliminating illness, disability or premature death
• Eliminating health disparities
• Addressing social determinants of health
• Improving access to quality health care
• and many others

HealthyPeople 2020 mid-course review – https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/data-search/midcourse-review/lhi

One way to track the health of the nation every year is with the leading causes of death which can be found here https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm for all ages in the United States. To learn more about different causes of death by sex, age, and race, download or read the following report from National Vital Statistics. The rate of death is called mortality.

We can also see how long people are expected to live – this is called life expectancy. Right now the average life expectancy is 78.6 years according to the CDC. You can also see differences by sex and ethnicity here – https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db328.htm.

Generally, life expectancy has been on the rise across most of the world, reflecting advances in medicine. However, in the US life expectancy has declined for the past 3 years – https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-life-expectancy-drops-third-year-row-reflecting-rising-drug-overdose-suicide-rates-180970942/.

How would you define health? There are several interconnected and related
dimensions of wellness that are dynamic – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5508938

What makes your health better or worse? All of the factors that influence
your health, including your genetic code, your behaviors, and your environment,
are called the determinants of health – https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/about/foundation-health-measures/Determinants-of-Health

Social determinants of health – https://www.cdc.gov/socialdeterminants/index.htm

To learn more about how social determinants of health can impact our lives,
watch this movie. Go to the BMCC Library website – http://lib1.bmcc.cuny.edu/ and click on Databases. Select Video Databases, then select Kanopy Streaming Videos. If you are not on campus, you will have to log in with your BMCC log-on (the same credentials you use to log into computers on campus). When you are in the Kanopy database, search for Unnatural Causes. Your result will say Collection on it. Watch the movie titled In Sickness and in Wealth.

Is the United States a healthy country? Read more here – https://unnaturalcauses.org/assets/uploads/file/AmazingFacts_small.pdf.