Exercise as a Pill!!!

Medical and Health professionals have come to the general consensus that exercise is related to health. Exercise helps control your weight(which is related to multiple other diseases), decreases your risk of heart diseases, helps your body manage blood sugar and insulin levels, may help you quit smoking if you are, improves your mental health and mood, delays cognitive decline in the geriatric population, strengthens your bones and muscles, reduces your risk of cancers, reduces your risk of falls which have increased mortality in the geriatric population, helps you sleep better, and is associated with reduced risk of dying early.

The Efficacy of Exercise as an Intervention

Exercise is the single most efficacious intervention used by physical therapists and has no side effects. The benefits of exercise are numerous, and the associations between physically active individuals and better quality of life exist across the whole human spectrum. It does not matter if you are a male or a female, Asian or African if you are physically active you are more likely to live a longer and a healthier life.

Exercise is medicine that every patient needs to take. Its tremendous and proven clinical benefits should not be denied to any patient. Especially in patients who have chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and hypertension to list just three. Patients are more likely to follow an exercise prescription when it's connected to disease they are currently dealing with. Explaining how regular exercise can improve the patient's condition may increase compliance of home exercise plans among patients. Prescribing exercise can often do patients more good than referring them to multiple doctors.

Exercise as an adjunct to traditional medicine

Patients are often always resistant to undergoing all sorts of medical procedures from chemotherapy to surgery and yet they do these procedures even when they do not want to, based on the belief that these procedures will help them with their condition even after going through extremely unpleasant side effects. If exercise was to be seen as a pill or prescription by the patients, they would be able to avoid these unpleasant treatments and see an improvement in their condition almost immediately.

Exercise and Aging

In the average adult the average loss of strength per decade is around 10% after 30 years and accelerates to around 15% per decade after the age of 60 years. Leg strength has been shown in studies to be the most significant predictor of institutionalization in the western countries and it is more important than even the physiological markers of disease. If older adults are not significantly physically active or do not have the reserves of strength from their younger years it can result in significant mobility disability and subsequent institutionalization. The accelerated loss of strength seen in the geriatric population, which impairs balance and mobility is often the end result of inactivity. The loss of function is from weakness and not directly from the disease. The loss of mobility rather than the medical condition often becomes the functional consequence that causes the individual’s disability. This can be improved often, quite simply by exercise.

Recommendation for a Health Professional

An essential step that needs to be undertaken by our healthcare system is that it needs to get patients more physically active and needs to record their exercise habits. Exercise as a vital sign needs to be added with the current vital signs we monitor in history taking and patient documentation. There is no better indicator of a person’s health and longevity than the min/ week of activity they engage in. The accuracy of self reported exercise is often pretty low, but this does not diminish the importance of the exercise vital sign.

Adults who engage in less than 150min/week of exercise and children doing less than 420 min/week should be flagged as not meeting the recommended amounts of physical activity to improve their health. They should be advised on the importance of being more active and ideally offered counselling and support by physical therapists to help them increase their exercise. At Physiogic we have physiotherapists with decades of experience who utilize the latest evidence based techniques and knowledge to tailor specific exercise regimes to the clients needs.

Policy Making promoting Exercise

Another step that could be taken to promote exercise could be lowering the premiums for health insurance for people who regularly exercise. It is common knowledge that health insurance costs more for people at high risks for diseases, like the geriatric population, but since exercise is an excellent predictor of health the insurance providers could offer discounts or lower rates to people who exercise regularly. This would promote exercise while being of no additional burden to the insurance providers.

CREDITS

Dr. Muhammad Mubarak Janjua, PT, The Health Company, Physiogic