OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND FITNESS

MANIFESTO

Occupational health, Fitness and Wellbeing Home

n	Charter

n	Health and fitness slide

n	From injury to dysfunction

n	Manifesto

n	Model

n	Objectives

n	Risk factor audit

n	Strategy

n	Swifties and fallacies

n	What we can do for you?

n	Ebook presentation: Best Practice in Occupational Health, Fitness and Wellbeing

n	The Crookback Proposal

PREAMBLE

The word 'health' means 'to be whole'. We are dis-at-ease when we experience a lack of wholeness. Through the ages, the meaning of the word 'disease' has changed. It has come to mean 'infection caused by random misfortune' rather than dysfunction of a body system to which one can attribute a cause.

The infectious diseases have, by and large been eliminated from the Western world - this happened in the first half of the 20th Century through fresh water being piped to homes, dirty water being removed in pipes, glass allowing sun light into homes, affluence and immunization. Antibiotics aside, pharmaceuticals had little to do with it.

The infectious diseases (tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet and rheumatic fever) were, by and large cleared up by improvements in public health and not by medication. Tuberculosis which was the number 1 public enemy in 1900 was well and truly in decline in the Western world public prior to the development of antibiotics.

We are now in the midst of an epidemic of poor health, due principally to lifestyle neglect. The infectious diseased have been replaced by body system dysfunctions.

The species that was designed to draw water, chop wood, climb trees and amble around for about 2000 minutes a week now coops themselves up in cages, sitting down for that 2000 minutes.

Here in Australia, our governments support the bad luck theory of dysfunction in the way they allocate the public health budget, currently somewhere in excess of $60B per year and by the way they focus attention on treatment of symptoms, not cure. Lifestyle neglect is rewarded by a subsidy on selective-evidence, symptom masking, pharmaceutically-based, seven minute, reductionist, blank cheque, junk medical treatment.

This is why there are 2m people on hypertension tablets; why 75 million packets of paracetamol (each containing 24 tablets) are sold every year; why there are 1m diabetics out of a population of 20m, why there are over 200 million visits to the medical profession: why there is an exponential growth in pharmaceutical prescriptions.

Most of the things that happen to us happen through under-use, over-use or mis-use, leading to dysfunctions of one or more major body systems, particularly the autonomic nervous system, the immune system and the musculo-skeletal system.

Most of the things that happen to us are not diseases, they're body system dysfunctions. The big killers today, cancer and arteriosclerosis, hardly rated a blip on the radar screen 100 years ago - cancer now driven largely by a toxic environment -and arteriosclerosis, driven by inadequate absorption and poor elimination.

There are some things we call 'syndromes' because we don't know the cause.

Calling an illness a body system dysfunction is more likely to lead to a search for the cause and the understanding that by doing something, you can restore the wholeness.

At root our body system dysfunctions begin with our habits, attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviors. To change our health status we need to change out thinking. It is also associated with an increasingly toxic environment. There are now something like 4000 food additives that weren't there 1000 years ago. We pump toxic degreasers on our heads and wipe aluminum salts under our arms. We take in the host of poisons in the form of paracetamol, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, sugar, insecticides, herbicides, artificial hormones, prescription medicines.

Our diet lacks essential vitamins, minerals, fats and sugars.

If you don't have a strong immune system, a fully functioning elimination system, an adequate diet, a regular and systematic aerobic, strength and flexibility training program and an ability to manage the stress of your life you're leaving yourself wide open to all manner of body system dysfunctions.

Whilst poverty and poor health appear to go hand in hand, it is a distorted philosophy which goes on to finger poverty as the cause of poor health, particularly in a country that has a universal education system and an economic safety net. If, as the saying goes, success has many fathers, poverty and poor health are both bastards!

Contrary to the opinion of symptomatic medical apologists, it is not the heroic diseases that are the major poor health issues in this country; in actual fact it is the every day body system dysfunctions; headaches, sore shoulders and crook backs, insomnia, lack of energy, feeling miserable, obesity, colds, elevated blood pressure, asthma, rashes, ... that people have to put up with on a daily basis. I call these the dys-eases of background noise. For some people the noise is deafening! You can make a choice, to quieten it down with a tablet or change your lifestyle.

And contrary to symptomatic medical opinion the health of Australians is not getting better. Until the national public and private health bill starts going down, you can be certain that health is getting worse.

Whilst people may statistically be living longer at the beginning of this century than at the beginning of the last, when infant and childhood mortality is taken into account, longevity has not improved greatly, if at all. The expected longevity of a person reaching the age of 60 has not changed in 150 years.

THE HEALTH AND FITNESS MANIFESTO

n	The right to health, sickness, accident, workers' compensation and early retirement benefits is attended by the responsibility to keep yourself fit and healthy to the best of your ability.

n	Staying fit and healthy is an investment. Medical treatment is a cost.

n	The body is an ecosystem, all systems are inter-related. In particular the mind has an intimate connection to other body systems. What goes on in the head will affect the body and vice versa, whether for better or worse. Similarly the liver is intimately related to many other body systems, etc etc.

n	Every dys-ease and dysfunction has a cause. Some are visible. Search for the hidden causes. A useful way to find the cause is to take a look from the head down, the inside out and back through time. Many dys-eases and dysfunctions will have more than one cause.

n	Narrowly focused, uni-modal observation might not pick out all the possible causes and therefore might not suggest the most appropriate range of treatments.

n	It is often the case that the causes of dys-ease and dysfunction are not at the site where the effect is being manifested. In particular, when it comes to musculo-skeletal dysfunction it is a brave diagnosis that locates the cause of the dysfunction at the site of the pain.

n	Subtle manifestations of dys-ease and dysfunction precede gross ones.

n	Big problems could have been easily solved when they were small. (Lao-tzu)

n	We have the ability to predict whether small problems will turn into large ones.

n	When appropriately stimulated, the body has wonderful, innate recuperative powers. Don't ignore the ancient and the long held recipes for improving your health and fitness.

n	Form follows function. It follows then that poor form is the result of poor function. Restore the function and you restore the form.

n	The Lifestyle Prescription® stands head and shoulders above all other prescriptions for keeping yourself fit and healthy.

n	Your ability to stay healthy depends largely on your ability to keep fit.

n	Keeping fit and healthy and restoring yourself to the fit and healthy state requires an investment in time, effort, money and thought. Nothing was ever achieved without enthusiasm or persistence. (Many people gave up just as they were about to reach their goal!)

n	Aerobic physical activity contributes to the efficient functioning of all the major body systems.

n	Bones do what muscles tell them to do. Doing specific exercises that strengthen, loosen and give balance to muscle development, contributes to better skeletal function.

n	Talk to people who have had the dys-ease or dysfunction and find out what they did to restore themselves to good health. To effect a complete recovery, make sure the treatment fixes the cause(s) and not just the symptoms.

n	A successful rehabilitation program will be speeded up by the use of a range of modalities applied in a regular, systematic and intensive way. However the rehab modalities do not take the place of that which you need to do for yourself.

n	It's a big ask expecting your body to get better by having someone do something to you. Sooner or later you have to do something to yourself. This applies equally to vigorous aerobic activity for the major body systems and to strengthening, loosening and postural alignment exercises for the musculo-skeletal system.

n	Like poor workmen, the tendency is for people to blame their tools (and their jobs), rather than themselves for the cause of their dys-ease and dysfunction.

n	You are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings and actions.

n	You are responsible for your own rehabilitation. No physician or therapist can do as much to restore yourself to good your health as you can do for yourself. (US Surgeon General)

n	As a rule people become distressed and frustrated by their inability to deal successfully with circumstances. Their stress is not due to the circumstances themselves.

FOCUS ON THE BODY AS AN ECOSYSTEM

The body is an ecosystem. All systems within it are related and interact with each other.

To believe other wise, ie to believe that the parts work in isolation, is the root of the current epidemic of poor health in our community.

Corporate organisations are bearing the brunt of this epidemic and paying through the nose for body system dysfunctions that are not of the organisations causing.

Nevertheless, it behoves organisations to move heaven and earth to encourage their staff to keep themselves fit and healthy to the best of their ability.

The need for corporate organisations to focus more attention on health and fitness stems from the observation that in many occupations, especially sedentary occupations, a significant proportion of physical and mental dys-ease and dysfunction is caused by what is happening inside the body, as opposed to external factors (like the chair and the keyboard).

For many organisations OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND FITNESS has become more important than occupational safety. These organisations have reached the point where the costs of poor health and fitness now exceed the costs of unsafe work environments and work practices.

The concept of OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND FITNESS is underpinned by a number of principles.

n	The Lifestyle Prescription® stands head and shoulders above all other prescriptions for keeping yourself healthy.

n	Health is more than the absence of disease

n	People can choose to be healthier.

n	People have an ability to improve and maintain their health and fitness in a way that enables them to - do their jobs successfully without breaking down, and - live fit, healthy, rich and fulfilling lives.

In this day and age, a focus on occupational health and fitness is even more imperative because motion starvation has reached epidemic proportions. Lack of fitness is now the major cause of dys-ease and dysfunction in the Australian community.

An OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND FITNESS program links

• health and physical fitness

• physical and mental well-being, and

• personal and career development.