Living Well And Healthy, Part 18

In addition to staying healthy, eating right, and managing stress, Healthwise offers the following three strategies to help maintain your health:

1. Create positive expectations for health and healing.
Mental and emotional expectations can influence medical outcomes. The effectiveness of any medical treatment depends in part on how useful you expect it to be.  The "placebo effect" proves this.  A placebo is a drug or treatment that provides no medical benefit except for the patient's belief that it will help. On the average, 35 percent of patients who receive placebos report satisfactory relief from their medical problem, even though they received no actual medication.

2. Open yourself to humor, friendship, and love.
Positive emotions boost your health.  Fortunately, almost anything that makes you feel good about yourself helps you stay healthy.

• Laugh.  A little humor makes life richer and healthier. Laughter increases creativity, reduces pain, and speeds healing.  Keep an emergency laughter kit that contains funny videotapes, jokes, cartoons, and photographs.  Put it with your first aid supplies and keep it well stocked.
• Seek out friends.  Friendships are vital to good health. Close social ties help you recover more quickly from illness and reduce your risk of developing diseases ranging from arthritis to depression.
• Volunteer.  People who volunteer live longer and enjoy life more than those who do not volunteer.  By helping others, we help ourselves.
• Appeal to the Spirit.  Faith, prayer and spiritual beliefs can play an important role in recovering from an illness. Your sense of spiritual wellness can help you overcome personal trials and things you cannot change.

(Dealing with chronic pain will be taken up on Monday, 29 July 2013. - J.P.)