Anyone that knows me well knows that I do not watch or listen to the news. There is too much negative information and I do not want to hear all that negativity. When a news story is big news, I will hear about it from family or friends or just by turning on my PC.
This morning, for instance, I turned on my PC and launched my internet browser. My home page is set to Yahoo so I can log into my personal email when that is what I want to do or, often times, I’ll just quickly go to whatever page I need to get to. My attention was quickly caught by the headline on Yahoo about the “condition that kills shocking number of women.”
As a Wellness Coach, my mission is to work with people who want to live a healthier lifestyle, using a natural approach, by offering encouragement, providing education, and assisting with exploration; and my focus is women that struggle with cholesterol and have a family history of heart disease.
As you can imagine, I had to click on this news link since I knew it was going to talk to heart disease. And it did.
Barbra Streisand’s mission is to end heart disease among women and she has co-founded The Women’s Heart Alliance which launched a new initiative called Fight the Lady Killer to “raise awareness, encourage action and drive new research to fight women’s heart disease.” It sounds like the focus with this initiative is to be proactive and preventative with education and altering lifestyle opposed to being reactive after the heart attack has hit, where I think too much focus is often spent.
Personally, I want to have as much control over my health as I possibly can. I don’t want to rely on medication and technology to save my life. Now, should I ever need to use that technology, I am very thankful that it is there, so is there a time and a place for all the technology? Absolutely. The technology around heart disease saves many lives and is needed. I just read a stat yesterday from the American Heart Association that the cardiovascular disease death rate declined by 33% from 1999 to 2009.
My guess is that this decrease is due to all the technology advancements. I would love to see a statistic about how many people avoid heart disease altogether by living a healthier lifestyle. I imagine coming up with that number is not possible. If it was, that is the statistical group I want to be in.
