Preventive medecine: blatant examples of harmful behaviour

PREVENTIVE MEDECINE: BLATANT EXAMPLES OF HARMFUL BEHAVIOUR

Overnutrition
Obesity caused by eating too much of the wrong things can result in all kinds of diseases and disabilities secondary to obesity, and the link between cancer and obesity is now too well proven to ignore. It is estimated that one in three Americans are clinically overweight; juvenile obesity is a growing cause for concern (with post-mortem studies on young teenagers finding serious deposits of atheroma in their arteries); too much fat and too much energy have provable ill-effects and produce cancers, diabetes and gall-stones; the over-consumption of salt produces high blood pressure, and the decrease in dietary fibre produces many ill-effects.

Lack of physical activity
Ninety-three per cent of UK homes have a TV set and the average family watches more than three hours a day. The average western person now spends more time watching TV than doing anything else other than sleep or work. The modernization of industry and the universal use of cars and labour-saving devices in the home make us all unused to strenuous muscular effort.
There is now good evidence regular and fairly strenuous exercise is positively valuable to health, helps keep us slim, helps control foe intake, improves our sense of being and keeps old people fitter and happier.

Motor-vehicle accidents
Road accidents kill about 50,001 citizens and injure another 5 million each year. Speeding, failure to use seat-belts or motorcycle helmets, and alcohol and soft or hard drugs are frequently involved.

Violence
All western countries are becoming more violent. Between 1960 and 1975 the rate of violent crime in the US (murder, rape, assault and robbery) tripled. The US has one of the highest murder rates in the world (about five times that of the average European country). Violence and vandalism are now an increasing reality in inner-city schools throughout the western world and even within the family violence is on the increase, with battered children and spouses an increasing problem. The suicide r; in the western world is rising. Man} quite sober and responsible experts now see violence as a culturally sanctioned way of problem-solving in American life!

Failing family relationships and marriages
There is a provable link between divorce and poor health and early death, and more than a third of all western marriages now end in divorce. The married have a significantly longer lifespan and in England and Wales the married have less chronic illness (especially mental illness) than the formerly married and make fewer demands on the health-care system. Divorced people have more days off work, more mental illness, and are more likely to be admitted to mental hospital and to have minor ailments than are the married. Recent US research has found that all illness-including cancer-is more common in the formerly married than in the married. Children raised in single-parent families have more illness and make more demands on the health-care system than do those with two parents. A lack of physical and psychological support is probably largely to blame but many single-parent families also become poor (if they are not already so) and poverty brings its own health hazards.

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GENERAL HEALTH

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