The heightened fears, anxiety, worries, panics, unease, apprehension, and concern about your health are associated with understanding health from categorical beliefs. Beliefs that are entrenched in observation that cannot be measured by quantitative means. However, health perceptions from a continuum spectrum, though not numerically quantifiable, allow you to see them in ranges, bands, gamut, arrays, or scopes. Continuum of health provides you with the prospects for choice and the possibility of a deeper understanding of health and associated care.
World Health Organization (WHO) put health in perspective as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” At every stage of your life, there is and would be a health scare; in other words, there will not be completeness in health. Traversing health care is unique, dynamic, and specific, and the changes are not linear or cyclic but on a plain pedestal that allows trajectory back-and-forth movement between wholeness and very ill or nearing death.
Think about it: seasons- spring, summer, fall, and winter- are pretty in a continuum, though predictable and probably constant in their changes. In contrast, your health is in a continuum of continuous progression, with the adjoining components like each other, but the extremes are evident. Unlike seasons that are perceptibly different from each other, your health changes slowly over time, involving finite transitions without immediate deviations or significant disruptions. It is challenging and tricky to perceive your health in a continuum.
When discussing the health continuum, continuity, sequence of events, continuance, connection, endurance, perpetuity, and persistence come to mind. At Continuum of Health (COH), we will help you navigate wellness-illness spectra when faced with health scares. Your health today should not spell doom to a better quality of life. Regardless of where you are on the spectrum, whether fifty more years or a few days to live, your life should be meaningful and reflective of joy and happiness in the least.
Continuum of Health will help promote awareness of the wellness-illness spectrum of health as it applies to you and your family. Traversing various states of health wellness and illness, which include perfect health to nearing death, fluctuates during life. The movement along this health continuum can cause uncertainty in how you live your life; we want you to understand that your health today should not adversely impact your joy and happiness.
There are several models to explain the health-illness continuum; the common theme encompasses a high level of wellness, good health, everyday health, illness, and death. While it might be safe to say that the lines between the elements of a health-illness continuum are blurred, the transition along the spectrum is fundamentally unpredictable and random. We face chronic disease or condition as we journey through this life, especially at certain ages. The impacts of these diseases or conditions raise underlying questions about how we will live. As we continue to discuss how we live our lives, we will discuss heart disease, cancer, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD), stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, Asthma, and arthritis. Other conditions include but are not limited to Inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome), cystic fibrosis, obesity, eating disorders, osteoporosis, sudden cardiac arrest in youth, oral health, and tobacco use and related conditions.