KNOWING YOUR HEALTH STATUS

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.