Reform Your Own Health Care (part 2)

It takes a profound kind of modern-day alchemy to make it through the day in this shrinking post-industrial world. Every morning people wake up just to jump into their cars and rush barking mad to work, juggle raising families and tending to careers, or deal with the responsibilities of winning or losing the bread in this economy. And recent college graduates have to confront their disaffection toward their expensive education, with no apparent reward of a job.

No doubt, people's stress levels are on the rise and health levels are on the dive.

Making a giant lifestyle change to improve your health is sometimes a decision you make out of duress, nudging from family, or the numbers taunting you on the scale. Whatever the impetus, you own it and need to feel the most comfortable to make a change.

Last week I posted the top three ways to manage your own health care. Here are three more things you might want to consider when restructuring a lifestyle regimen:

You are what you put ON your body, too: Did you know that 60% of what you put on your skin gets absorbed into your system? Scary. After years of using hair products saturated with parabens and other preservatives, I had to make a conscious effort to break out of this toxic cycle.

Since cosmetics are not regulated like the FDA regulates food quality in the U.S., I turn to the Environmental Working Group website, my cosmetics bible, to check out the safety levels and ranking of specific cosmetic brands, household items (detergents and soaps), and even individual ingredients: You can really go crazy at this site and type in every ingredient that sounds extraterrestrial to you to find out if there are any cancer, reproductive, and allergy risks, as well as any known violations.

Moving around, I mean really getting out there and breaking a sweat: The CDC recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week for healthy adults. The recommendations here seem accessible and reasonable for everyone:

All this leads to the last and most simple suggestion:

Get preventative care: I cannot stress the importance of preventative medicine, especially knowing now that it's more cost-efficient to curb or prevent an illness or life-threatening disease before it gets too uncontrollable. Sadly millions of people go without adequate health insurance, so preventative medicine becomes a luxury rather than a necessity. I don't know the solution to this problem, I'm always left flummoxed and depressed at this point, because it leads us wondering who's going to pay for these exams? Is it the government, private insurance, non-profits, you and I? Is that what all this screaming is about?

If you're one of the fortunate ones with health insurance that covers routine screenings and preventative exams---take advantage of it! For example, if you know you have a history of breast cancer in your family, consider getting a test done to isolate the gene that can affect your cancer risk. Might not narrow your chances of developing cancer, but this could give you the knowledge to make a step toward preventing it. Maximize the health care coverage you DO have, as outlined in a recent MainStreet article.

I hope these suggestions engage people in the "self health care" topic to mobilize some to take action to not only get well but BE well. We all can't be part-time alchemists, but we can all try to transform our bad habits into more effective, intelligent ones to produce a workable, sustainable formula to the life we live now.

Guess it really does start at home.