I think people need to start taking more responsibility for their own health. So much emphasis is placed on the ‘failing health care system’, which yes, is overburdened, but whatever happened to personal accountability?
Doctors might see you once or twice a year, how are they supposed to ‘fix’ what you don’t care about on the other 363 days of the year? Guess what: you smoke, you drink, you’re obese, you barely move from your couch, your attitude is terrible. Nobody is shocked you don’t feel well, and your negativity is poison to your wellness! For the people who have these attitudes like “I need help! I need meds! Nobody is doing anything for me! All doctors and nurses are stupid and useless!”, here is a your prescription- take some responsibility.
You are not powerless, there are many things you can modify both psychologically and physiologically. Take yourself for a walk around the block, modify your diet, let go of hate and blame and try being kind; pills aren’t your only answer. We all want a quick fix, but it doesn’t exist! Health is hard work, but you are capable of being so much more helpful to yourself than anyone else can! You can do this, let 2017 be your year.—Tough Love
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2016.
Harsh, but reasonable. People refuse to change their smoking and eating habits and expect our health care system to fix them when they’re already passed the point of no return. What’s the sense of open heart surgery on someone who continues to destroy their body?
Fuck off with the couch cliche. I don’t even own one.
Amen! Having visited our health sciences centres and seeing first hand some of the patients waiting in their johnny shirts for procedures I ask myself why did they not notice the mess they were in years ago? The obesity and accumulated health effects did not manifest overnight. The damage was over a lifetime and these people expect to get a treatment / medication thinking it will undo years of self harm and neglect.
I’m very healthy.
And a thousand Cheetos wept.
Most people ignore their unhealthy habits until they get sick. Then they expect the doctor to play ‘catch up’ and cure them of 30 years of rotten habits. There should be no surprise when the diagnosis is bad.
I’m in my 60s and walk 3-5 km daily. Keeps my weight down, feels great & doesn’t cost me a fucking cent. All it requires is getting one’s fat ass out of a chair.
Goood bitch, people are lazy, entitled idiots. Not real smart either apparently, shouldn’t be jammin’ cheesecake in your gate if you never get off your ass to pay for that.
Fat obese people who degrade other because they use marijuana are the worst hypocrites out there. Especially overweight Police officers who continue to uphold such inhumane laws.
Fat people should be illegal!
…..But Conservatives say “Legalization of marijuana will cause more people in the hospitals.”
Obese Conservatives who eats fast foods and drinks booze every weekend.
Legalize Marijuana and BAN MacDonald’s!!……Na, I am not like that. I do feel the need to have something i disagree with be made illegal and start throwing obese people in jail even though they are more a burden to Health Care System than Cigarette Smokers.Forget the potheads!
Fat people are the worst and biggest complainers on the land.
Those chips aren’t going to eat themselves…
Responsibility?
A:
It’s my parent’s fault
It’s the government’s fault
It’s society’s fault
It’s the school’s fault
B:
It’s white men’s/privilege fault
It’s big businesses fault
It’s violent video games fault
I dont have a role model
I dont have a safe place
Pick any one from section A and any two from section B.
(This comment contains 80% recycled material, and was written on un-ceded cyber-land…)
I think we should also be encouraging doctors to give nutritional/weight management advice. If someone comes in for a weight-related issue, they should be asked what they are doing to fix it. If the answer is sitting around, taking pills, then they should be given a walking program and told to come back in 6 weeks after they have lost 5 lbs so they can show they are serious about dealing with their weight issue which caused their other health problems.
This post is poison, and here’s why. Yes, you are right that people need to be accountable for their own health in a general sense, particularly with things like obesity and related diabetes, as those things (often) are preventable. But the rest is an extreme oversimplification of some very real issues – mental health, especially. Things like real depression and real anxiety cannot be cured with a walk around the block, and to suggest that they can be is totally ignorant. I don’t even mean that to be insulting – I mean that if you feel the way you seem to in your post, then you definitely do not know real information about those illnesses. Depression and anxiety in particular are extremely common. And it’s your kind of rhetoric that is especially damaging, not only because it places blame, but because on first glance (without real information) it “feels right”. It should be so simple! But it isn’t. Healthy, fit people with supportive families and all the opportunity in the world can have serious depression and anxiety – I do. “Out of the blue”. And medication changed my life. It made me, “Me” again. I assure you, I am not the exception. Sure, a walk in the park may relieve some stress for a moment, but only temporarily. It scares me that people reading this will either take what you said and start believing it, or will have mental illness and feel even more alone. To readers: If you don’t feel like yourself anymore, do seek help! I did. It was quick, it was easy, and it changed my life. You can be you again.
Jesus fucking Christ, those last two sentences are almost word for word from one of those anti depressant adds on TV, you should ask your doctor about. Made up symptoms for drugs that make you feel good. It baffles me that people buy into this shortcut lifestyle we seem to think we deserve. Now we have a bunch of drugged up people that cant deal with anything outside their comfort zone, or they’re at the doctor looking for the next pill to swallow. It boggles my fucking mind how lazy we all are nowadays, always looking for that magic tonic instead of learning how to deal with our shit. Why do we think we’re owed a charmed life, where all our problems can be solved with a prescription pad, applying one bandaid at a time? Do you even know what chemicals are in your pill? Do you know what chemicals those chemicals interact with? Do you actually know why they make you feel good?
This whole cycle of bullshit annoys me, and so do the whiney, snowflake “survivors” of imaginary “diseases” droning on about this bullshit or that. You are not helping anyone by validating your own bullshit!
There are a number of forces at work here.
One is that it is natural for people to indulge in self-medication to deal with stress, anxiety, depression, fatigue, shyness, and other problems. It might be alcohol to relax or socialize. Junk food to lift our mood. Cigarettes to fight stress. Rather than recrimination I think it would be more helpful if people were offered help with coping with the problems of daily life. It would make them less likely to abuse all these “self-medications”.
The second thing is that Government needs to find a way to reign in the processed food industry. They have thousands of people working for them to design foods that have just the right texture, taste, and pleasure inducing affect. It’s no wonder that people get hooked on sodas and the like. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine…
T.T. FoBo and Furious Poprah – What is wrong with you? Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you? Do you always speak to other people this way? What necessitated being so aggressive? If you weren’t protected by a username, would you still say things like that to someone in public? A stranger who do not know anything about responded to a post on a message board about their depression and anxiety, and that is how you responded to them. Go fuck yourselves. You should be so embarrassed.
Exercise, particularly strenuous exercise, releases dopamine….which improves mood, outlook and ironically helps with physical health. Not saying it’s the cure-all, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. An inactive and sedentary lifestyle always leads to problems…
The feeling’s mutual, Selina Kyle – which I’m sure is your real name – loloz. Just don’t go around making blanket statements on depression & anxiety. You diminishing my own personal solution is what I have issue with. Not everyone who suffers from this condition wants to be a fucking wah-wah victim. Some of us want to get beyond feeling sorry for ourselves. And, yes, I would say this to your face, no problemo.
Nothing is wrong with me, and there is nothing wrong with 60 – 70% of people wolfing down harsh chemicals which alter your mood, personality, and chemistry, creating depression when not taking your highly addictive magic pills. You wanna take the “quick and easy” route, go ahead, but don’t push your bullshit on the masses. Some people should find the root cause of their depression and anxiety and deal with it the proper way, eliminating the problem, not swallowing pill because some random wingnut on the internet told them to go get some drugs. What are you, a fucking doctor? There are absolutely people who need meds, and that, IMO, should be a last resort. The last thing we need is for a bunch of self proclaimed internet doctors selling people highly addictive snake oil. Do you work in pharmaceutical sales? Because it sure sounds like it!
A tip of the vape to you, Poprah – your response was perfect. We’ve definitely harshed Selina’s well-tuned pharmaceutical buzz.
Selina,
T.T. FoBo and Furious Poprah will never G9 fuck themselves. They are nameless Internet trolls and their length and gerth are measured by the absurdity of their last post. At the moment, they are turtledicks.
Said a poster named ‘Great Value’. Thanks for the belly laugh, folks.
What’s a turtledick?
Oh yes, GV, because I don’t drink the Big Pharma coolaid, I must be an internet troll, says the other internet troll. Gimme a fucking break!! I’ve been weaned off anti depressants before, it’s not a pleasant experience. This idea that these drugs are being marketed on fucking TV is absurd, and all these dummies that are going through a hard time in life are being influenced by chemical companies driven by shareholder profit. They do not have people’s health or best interests in mind while they advertise their chemical happiness, hoping some poor sucker will nibble at the bait. Then they have a customer for life, just like the guy selling crack on the corner. As someone who suffers from PTSD (yes I know what triggers it and I have learned to deal with it), social anxiety, low self esteem, etc..doesn’t mean I need to be hopped up on god know what to survive my pretty boring life of working, sleeping and doing a few other things. I have learned to let go of all the bullshit and just exist. Am I happy? For the most part, but I get to run the whole gambit of human emotions, not just the ones I choose to feel like some drugged up zombie.
If that makes me an internet troll, so be it.
Furious Poprah, I swear you’re my long lost twin. You just articulated what’s been percolating in my brain box since this debate with ‘Selina Kyle’ commenced. We’ve shared the same battlefield & rejected the easy lure of pharmaceutical numbness. Thankfully, the PX dispensary has plenty of UK cheese bud.
Hey guys,
lets get serious for a second.
if you are looking for some insight on this topic. look up ‘stanford chronic disease self management program’. the program was put through clinical trials many years and most community health organizations have adopted it in part or full. It is a series of workshops – often provided for free – to anyone with one or more chronic conditions. So you might find yourself in a small group, one person dealing with heart disease, another with depression, another obesity, another with type one diabetes and an amputated leg, etc. The program is based on the premise that when you condition is not acute( broken leg, ruptured apendix,etc) and is of a chronic nature, what you do as a patient at home plays a large role on how you manage and progress with your condition. It covers a wide range of strategies, tools, and planning that helps you with your self management.
It sounds boring, but its actually quite good. the workshop is ‘led’ by someone like you, not a healthcare professional, they are someone with a chronic condition as well.
Halifax definitely has this program. Please seek it out if you feel it is something you’d like to learn more about.
Ok, so now that I got this out, let the trolling commence you dickless wonders.
I like “liking” all the comments here – from both sides of the argument. A good evening read, indeed!