Why you should take responsibility for your own health

According to a PBS article, healthcare costs per American amounts to $10,345 per year. This totals $3.35 trillion that our country spends every year on healthcare. In case you didn’t know, that is a lot of money.

We spend an average of more than $10,000 per year, per person on healthcare, which, at least for me, is a big amount. No doubt, it is a big issue for our society as well.

However, I personally doubt that the issue is something that the government can ever solve. Why? Because I believe that you and I are the ones responsible for the health of our own bodies, rather than the health care system.

In our society, we value the fact that, when we get sick, medical science is so advanced that we can go to the doctor for treatment for almost anything. Whatever it is, you can pretty much get some kind of pill or therapy for it.

I agree that there is a value in that, but when you live in a society like ours that has extremely high rates of lifestyle diseases — also known as preventable diseases — such as obesity, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, the issue of how much we have to pay to treat these ailments is secondary. So, why is preventable disease so prevalent in American society?

The answer, in my opinion, includes several reasons, two of which I would like to discuss.

First, our busyness has caused us to put our health on the back burner. We miss sleep and we fail to take the time to cook healthy food, among other things. Society feeds this tendency by providing us with all the quick, unhealthy food that we could desire, as well as by distracting us with work, technology and other things.

Second, because we live such compartmentalized lives, we forget that the lifestyle decisions we make directly influence our health. What I mean by “compartmentalized” is, we put all of the different parts of our lives into their own little boxes. We have a box for work, a box for family, a box for our spiritual lives, and many other boxes for many other things. Among those is a box for our health, and because we see it as its own separate box, we tend to feel like if something goes wrong with that box, it’s a random occurrence. We rarely consider that the issue with our health box could be related to another issue with a totally different box.

What I am saying is that you and I have so much more control over our own health than we realize. Doctors and other medical professionals do not decide for us what we will eat, how long we will sleep, how we handle stress, or whether we will spend time outside in the sun and fresh air. Who decides those things? We do — and all of these decisions are tied to our health.

Will we continue to neglect stewardship of our individual health by letting busyness distract us? Will we continue in a lack of understanding of how our decisions impact our health and instead shoulder the load of our health onto our doctors?

I have a strong feeling that healthcare costs would go down if we take more responsibility for our individual wellness. What about you?

This story was originally published March 17, 2017 at 8:24 AM with the headline "Why you should take responsibility for your own health."