Disease and Medication - "I Guess We Like it So"

Do you know anyone who has a disease? You know one of those nasty chronic degenerative diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's or obesity? You know the kind of disease that hits you in your fifties, if you're lucky or maybe in your forties or thirties if you're not.

This may sound like a rhetorical question because disease is all around us. Case in point, my sister is a diabetic and so is my cousin. My aunt has arthritis; a friend has high cholesterol and another, breast cancer. And this is all in my immediate circle; the people that are closest to me.

Statistically, 1 in 2 of us will have one chronic degenerative disease by the time we are 50 and 2 out of 3 will have 2 or more chronic degenerative diseases by the time we are 65. I'm not a betting person, but these are not good odds.

But with all of this doom and gloom around us, the amazing thing is that we do have some control over our health, in fact a great deal of control. Taking control of our health while we have it just makes infinite sense. I want everyone to take a deep breath and say with conviction: "DISEASE IS NOT MY DESTINY."

Now what I am going to say next is nothing you haven't heard before. Yes, it's all about preventative health care. I like to refer to it as a triad of healthy lifestyles that promotes good health: proper nutrition; exercise and supplementation. Yes, yes, you've heard it all before. But it we know that the secret is preventative health care, why is it that we don't practice the secret?

Why can't we find 30 minutes every day to go for a walk? Why do we continue to eat nutrient deficient foods that pack on the pounds? Why don't we supplement our diets with pharmaceutical grade supplements so that our bodies can benefit from antioxidants and anti inflammatory nutrients that have been proven to help preserve our health?

Parents, wives, husbands, teachers, doctors and health care professionals we need to start teaching and preaching preventative health care. Taking prescription medication should be a last resort, not our first line of defense. And when we are 20 pounds overweight, our doctors should be telling us to lose those pounds and showing us how to do it.

A very wise doctor once said "we live too short and die to long." And just how brilliant is that? We live well into our seventies and eighties but we are often sick and on prescription medication by the time we reach our fifties or before.

I am not suggesting that we can just we can just rid humanity of disease - that's just too naive. But there is a whole lot we can do to ward off and keep disease at bay. In the final analysis, illness and death do not appear to be much of a deterrent. And to quote one of our famous Trinidadian sayings, "I guess we like it so"