Why & How to be Proactive about Your Health
Nearly all forms of healthcare fall into one of two categories: proactive healthcare and reactive healthcare.
Unfortunately, most busy women give little thought to being proactive about their healthcare. Instead, they focus strictly on reactive healthcare when an issue arises.
Reactive healthcare involves reacting to an adverse disease, injury, condition or symptom. If you wake up one morning not feeling well, maybe you experience a fever and body aches, you react by visiting the doctor. Depending on your illness, you and your doctor come up with a plan to react to your symptoms and treat your ailments.
Proactive healthcare differs from reactive, as it encourages you to take action before symptoms manifest.
Rather than waiting until you feel the symptoms of the cold or flu virus, you take a proactive approach towards your health by boosting your immune system with vitamin C, antioxidants, and drinking plenty of fluids.
It may seem easier to simply wait to visit the doctor’s office or make changes to your lifestyle until a problem arises. But I can’t stress enough the importance of being proactive with your healthcare.
Proactive Healthcare: Why?
Proactive healthcare happens when you take responsibility to proactively manage your own health. You want to move from a physician “treating an ailment or disease” to a patient (YOU!) practicing “self-care” activities such as exercising, taking prescribed medications and vitamins, drinking water, watching their weight, eating healthy, etc.
By practicing proactive healthcare you prevent disease, detect disease early, and improve your healthcare results.
In addition, investing in proactive healthcare often saves money long term. By being proactive rather than reactive, you save on the cost of surgeries, prescription drugs, and other forms of treatment. For example, the average cost of an ER visit in 2013 was just over $2,100. This cost can often be avoided through lifestyle changes. A recent study found kidney stones to be among the most expensive and common reasons for ER visits. However, doctors say kidney stones are often preventable through dietary and lifestyle changes.
While there’s no way to completely eliminate healthcare costs altogether, one of the biggest ways to reduce it is through proactive healthcare.
Proactive Healthcare: How?
So, how can you take a more a proactive approach towards your healthcare?
Here are some great places to start:
- Have preventive blood work analyzed routinely
- Maintain a healthy weight
- Don’t smoke
- Maintain a physically active lifestyle with a proper exercise plan
- Strive for a solid 7-8 hours of restful sleep per night
- Educate yourself about your own unique body
- Fuel your body with healthy, nutrient dense foods with a proper diet plan
- Take optional supplements to support your health goals
- Know your genetic risks
Proactive Healthcare: Frelii Healthcare Subscription Service
In addition to a proper diet and exercise program, Frelii is one resource that I was recently introduced to that may be helpful with your proactive healthcare plan.
Frelii provides several preventative health offerings to it’s users through a monthly subscription service. This program includes a choice of testing kits, all analyzed to generate your personalized recommendations. Many other companies use cheap finger prick tools that are easily contaminated and often deliver faulty data. However, Frelii only runs data from full lab samples that are placed into vials and spun. This proves the only way to gather complete and correct data about your biomarkers.
Blood work analysis helps you see what genes are turned on and which ones aren’t, and how they’re working with your body. Frelii looks at the results of your blood lab tests and lets you know if you may be at risk of heart disease in 15 years. In addition, Frelii provides you with preventative measures to decrease those risks.
Proactive Healthcare: How Frelii Works
After filling out a short questionnaire, each Frelii member receives information about any potential health hazards in their lives (like stress/anxiety, cardiovascular health, adrenal fatigue, etc.). They also receive the percentage that risk factor affects their lives currently.
With access to the members page, your recommendations get based on the results from the questionnaire. Additionally, you can submit lab work – like ordering a blood lab panel, a micronutrient panel, and DNA testing done in partnership with 23 and Me.
Frelii gives its customers the option to purchase vitamins/supplements after they look at users’ health perimeters. Frelii always recommends that people get their blood work done before purchasing vitamins/supplements, that way they know the recommendations Frelii makes directly impact their deficiencies.
Keep in mind this is a preventative measure – it is not an actual medical diagnosis.
Want to use your insurance? No problem! Frelii is the only site where you can use your insurance to cover some or all the cost of your labs. They’re able do this because they utilize doctors to look over and approve every lab ordered from the site.
Proactive Healthcare: My Challenge to You
Focus on proactive, preventative health measures through simple things like having a healthy diet and a healthy exercise regimen and being proactive about your health by taking preventative measures such as joining Frelli.
Note: Frelii provides recommendations to individuals seeking to take preventative measures that improve their overall health – they do not provide diagnoses.