PHYSICAL HEALTH ISSUES

Helping students with health and wellness issues touched my heart and would like to share some thought with you. There is a common Latin proverb which states that, “mens sana, incopore sano”, which literally means, “A healthy mind lives in a healthy body”. This is true and confirms what Ernest Boyer (1990) wrote that, “Students cannot be intellectually proficient if they are physically and psychologically unwell.” With this in mind, how do we as prospective administrators, student affairs professionals, teachers, Pastors, to name but a few, ensure that students entrusted into our hands get health support?

As rightly stated in the text (p. 267), the causes of health problems are many and vary from place to place. Majority, however, are due to genetic and environmental factors as well as attitude. My concern is about the environmental and lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart diseases and several others. Once these theses are mostly contracted through our lifestyle, we can do something to facilitate their prevention. For instance, we can form a group to handle health problems and dissipate health information to students and the college community as a whole. This group collaborates with the health services in the institution to inform and educate students anytime there is a pandemic like the swine flu. Anytime health issue looms, members of this group look out of information and put it in public domain as swiftly as possible. An ounce of prevention, they say, is better than a pound of cure.

Obesity with its concomitant health problems can be prevented by educating vulnerable students to change their lifestyle. Too much sugar intake, late dinner, and excessive intake of refined starch should be avoided. With effective education and support, most physical and mental health problems prevalent in our schools can be prevented if not curtailed.