don's report archive

by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.

Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

I received a "call to action" the other day from both the American Heart Association (AHA) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. Joining these two large and powerful organizations in the "call" were the American Red Cross, the National Council on the Aging and the National Emergency Number Association.

While the summons to action was interesting, I decided not to heed the call. Maybe you, too, were called to action. Did you accept, or did you give it a pass? If you have not heard the call just yet, here is a summary of what it's about, and my reasons for not going along with it.

The call was a summons of sorts to health professionals to back a strategy designed to reduce deaths from heart attacks. This is a good idea, and worth a call for action. Last year, over a million Americans were attacked by their hearts -- and nearly half of these assaults (460,000) were fatal. Yet the AHA and Heart/Lung/Blood (henceforth HBL) people, being focused on organs and treatment, made the wrong call! They recommended the wrong action. They said, basically, let's take a variety of actions in order that heart attacks are not quite as deadly!

This approach seems so strange to me. Why not focus on preventing heart attacks in the first place? Why the emphasis on better treatment for those who have heart attacks? What's going on here? Does this make any sense to you? If you knew of a situation where people were going to be attacked, would you put out a call to doctors to get organized to better treat the injured, or would you call the police? For goodness sakes, why not prevent attacks in the first place?

We need patient and public education, which is what the HBL folks are calling for. However, the first priority should be on prevention of heart disease and promotion of wellness, not emergency services for those who will be afflicted. Rather than focus on new systems, advances and other reforms for rushing overweight and stressed-out smokers to emergency rooms AFTER the inevitable occurs, let's do a better job of educating and motivating these high-risk citizens about how to AVOID heart attacks. If the HBL types wait for the attacks to occur, by their own data they will lose half of the cases to death or disability, no matter how fast they act. We can do better than that via prevention and wellness.

Unfortunately, the big "call to action" campaign, entitled "Act in Time to Heart Attack Signs" (cute) does not seem targeted to the prevention of heart disease or, better yet, the promotion of wellness lifestyles. Instead, it offers these lesser goals:

1. Teach people how to recognize common heart attack warning signs.
2. Emphasize the need to call 9-1-1 within 5 minutes of a suspected heart attack.
3. Help people create a heart attack survival plan.

Ladies and gentlemen, the best heart attack survival plan is this: Develop a lifestyle that reduces your prospects of ever having one! Otherwise, it probably won't matter all that much where you have one. You can, for example, have one in an emergency room with a dozen of the leading heart surgeons in the universe standing over you, applying their skills to your situation, and the chances are terrific that you will be dead in a few minutes. If you live, you will likely suffer debilitating heart damage.

Here is a counter call to action: Organize your existence so that you design, carry out and sustain a joyful, exciting lifestyle! Live daily with a respect for and commitment to personal responsibility, high fitness levels, sound nutrition, stress management, a good sense of humor, perspective, the quest for meaning and other skill sets in the physical, mental and meaning/purpose dimensions conducive to self-management for lifestyle artistry. Do these things and the chances are far better that you won't be ill served by the HBL types who misdirect their calls to what are basically downriver lifesaving strategies. The focus should be upon changing the situation upriver, and doing something (lots of things) to prevent all those folks from falling into the river (health care system) in the first place.

You, too, might want to pass on the HBL call to action in order to heed the more commonsense approach of choosing, promoting and enjoying a wellness lifestyle.

Be well and look on the bright side of life.

POSTSCRIPT: Immediately after writing this essay, I received an e-mail from Win Morgan of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's "Health Information Network Project." He thanked me for suggesting that they put that kind of energy into strategies to help people act so as not to have heart attacks in the first place. I expected that this remark would be followed by a lot of reasons why I was a moron to suggest such a thing, or at least why it was impractical to do so, but no, Win Morgan went on to outline a wellness strategy that they were going to incorporate. He was even nice enough to imply that this was all because of my essay! In fact, this had been planned all along, as I soon discovered by doing a bit of additional research (by checking out their website.)

Tomorrow, I will conclude this essay with the details of what Win and the HBL folks are doing in the wellness arena and note why I have changed my mind. I plan to heed their call to action -- and will suggest you do the same and note how you can do that! Till then, be well.

(Note: This essay will be filed in the archives in the MENTAL DOMAIN under the skill area of effective decisions. Additional articles related to this theme may be found there.)

(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)

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