Exercise is medicine
What would you do to save your life, or the life of your loved one? Actions bear out the likely answer: Almost anything.
In an attempt to prolong or save lives, we donate organs, while some of us wait for those donations. In fact, according to organdonor.gov, more than 113,000 Americans currently await organ transplants. Every 10 minutes another name joins the waiting list, and every day time runs out for 20 people. We undergo lifesaving surgeries and treatments. Research shows, for example, that each year about 200,000 people in the United States alone have heart bypass surgery and approximately 650,000 people receive chemotherapy. Drug therapies for cancer often cause great distress to individuals as they battle to survive. For some, treatment leads to complications that prematurely end their lives.
Then there is the financial cost. In its report “2019 Global Health Care Outlook: Shaping the future,” professional services firm Deloitte points to USD$7.724 trillion in global healthcare expenditures in 2017. The firm projected this amount to grow 5.4% annually, reaching USD$10.059 trillion by 2022 (www.deloitte.com/healthcareoutlook).
That’s right. The global healthcare system spends trillions of dollars every year, in large part, to reverse, manage or slow the damage we too often do to ourselves in our busy, complicated world. We stay in the sun too long, overeat, consume the wrong kinds of food, sit all day at work, spend hours on the couch at home, drink too much alcohol, take too many drugs (legal or not), and down sugar like, well, candy.
How can we change our population’s health and well-being? While no one magic pill can prevent illness, there are things we can do to help others—and ourselves—age well, or at least better than we see today.
Given that about 92% of older adults have at least one chronic disease, and 75% of them take at least one prescription medication, and have frequent contact with the healthcare system. A proactive approach to preventing, improving or slowing chronic or acute health issues can change lives for the better. This is the premise behind the movement to use exercise as medicine.
States International Council on Active Aging Advisor Steven Blair, PED, distinguished professor emeritus with the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health, and chief scientific editor for the first US Surgeon General’s report on physical activity and health: “Regular exercise offers benefits across a wide range of health conditions and problems, from cancer to various types of gallbladder disease, plus heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most importantly, exercise can preserve function and independence.”
There are few things that you—or any one of us—could do to have a more profound effect on more bodily systems than exercise. When you exercise vigorously, every body system revs up: metabolic, biochemical, hormonal, temperature regulation, function and cardiovascular respiration. We were meant to be active. It’s our natural state. By being sedentary, we put ourselves in an unnatural state that sets the stage for ill health.
For this reason, the International Council on Active Aging? brings you a new resource created through a collaboration between members of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Exercise is Medicine? Older Adult Committee and the ICAA Advisory Board. We hope you will read and learn from this issue brief. Find out how best to work with the healthcare community to implement and support this exercise-as-medicine approach. And be part of the growing group of professionals who seek solutions that will help “every body” live a longer, better life.
Colin Milner, Founder/CEO, International Council on Active Aging
