KNOWING YOUR HEALTH STATUS
You would agreed with me that health
status is a vast topic. It cannot be exhausted in a single article such as
this. Let us define the term “Health” and “Status”.
Health means the condition of a
person’s body or mind. A person’s health could be good or poor.
Status means a condition or situation
of a person, things or process. Put together, by health status, we mean the
state of a person body physically and mentally.
When status is mentioned in relation
to health, what readily comes to our mind is HIV status. Don’t blame us for
that mindset, for HIV has caused a lot of havoc to our society. Its mortality
rate is unprecedented.
To many of us health means absence of
diseases. This is not correct. Even in the absence of diseases, we still engage
ourselves in prophylactic or preventive health measures.
It is even more important to know
your health status at the point when you are not sick. This can only be done
through routine medical examination and investigations.
Many chronic and debilitating disease
conditions are picked up on routine investigations e.g. Tuberculosis,
Hepatitis, Diabetes mellitus, HIV infection, cardiac and renal diseases etc.
At this juncture, let us look at the
organs and disease condition that are worrisome when we talk about health
status:
These are: Heart, kidney, liver,
brain, lungs, breast, cervix, prostate gland, colon, and endocrine glands such
as the pancrease, thyroid glad, pituary gland, testis, ovaries and the adrenal
glands etc. disease condition are: Diabetes, AIDS, Sickle cell disease,
tuberculosis, hepatitis, malignant tumours, bleeding disorders, syphilis, ABO
and Rhesus grouping disorders, Hypertension etc.
In conclusion, if we knew our health status
we could be able to prevent diseases like, stroke, cardiac arrest, cancers,
thrombo-embolism. With sophistication in medicine, now we can know the state of
our organ easily.
Note that some behaviours make us
prone to disease e.g. excessive intake of alcohol, abusing of drugs especially
the hard drugs, poor hygienic environment, sedentary life style, multiple sex
partners etc. If we can address these issues properly we would surely have a
good health status.
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