The health continuum, also referred to as the illness-wellness continuum, is an important concept that allows health professionals to educate their patients on the importance and the ways of monitoring and improving their health. The continuum is represented as a diagram showing two paradigms; the left line represents the treatment paradigm, while the right one represents the wellness paradigm (Oliver et al., 2018). The far left end of the treatment paradigm is defined as premature death, and the end of the wellness paradigm is defined as high-level wellness (Oliver et al., 2018). In the middle of the continuum, there is a neutral point, where the two paradigms meet.
This perspective is essential to consider when caring for patients because it helps to make them aware about their health and the measures they need to take to achieve an optimal level of wellness. In addition, the continuum shows that treating illness only allows achieving the ‘neutral point’, which is not enough to maintain high-level health. Many of the modern health systems aim to treat diseases, but they can often fail to promote further growth and healthy lifestyles. The illness-wellness continuum takes this into account, demonstrating the importance of the wellness paradigm.
Illness-Wellness Continuum for Health Care Providers
The understanding of the illness-wellness continuum is essential in my role of a health care provider due to several reasons. First, it enables me to promote the value and dignity of individuals or groups by taking their opinions, feelings, and desires into consideration and cooperating with them when determining their place on the health continuum (Patel & Chrisman, 2020). For example, it will help me to demonstrate the importance of useful health habits, which will in turn allow empowering patients and encouraging them to change harmful habits and improve their health. In addition, the human continuum allows me to serve others in ways that promote human flourishing. This is mainly due to the fact that I will not only work to treat the patients’ signs, symptoms, and disabilities. I will also pay significant attention to raising their awareness and education level in relation to the additional measures they can take to strengthen their mental and emotional health. The visual representation of the spectrum from poor health to high level of health will allow increasing their motivation to lead a healthy lifestyle.
Personal State of Health and the Stage on the Continuum
As for my overall state of health, I would currently describe it as satisfactory, but in need of certain lifestyle improvements. While the majority of activities that have an impact on my health support it, there are still factors and behaviors that detract me from moving towards the far right end of the health continuum. For example, I currently have a sufficient amount of physical activity; I exercise almost every day and go jogging two or three times a week. I can say that I have strong emotional health due to a favorable social environment and positive relationships with my family members.
At the same time, I sometimes struggle to maintain a healthy diet; I can occasionally skip meals because of intense workload and the lack of time. At other times, I can eat unbalanced and untimely meals, even though I understand the negative consequences of doing that. In addition, I do not pay enough attention to my sleeping patterns; I often go to bed late even if I have to go to work or study early in the morning. As a result, I do not have enough sleep on weekdays and sleep too much when I have days off. Taking these factors into consideration, it can be suggested that I am currently in the middle of the health continuum, at the neutral point. While I do not have any chronic illnesses or serious harmful habits, such as drinking or smoking, there are factors that prevent me from moving in the direction to achieve a high level of health.
Options and Resources
Like many people, I have resources and options that can help me to move toward wellness on the health-illness spectrum. For example, to address my problem of irregular and inadequate nutrition, I can consult a nutritionist, who will prescribe tests that will show if I have vitamin deficiencies (Firth et al., 2020). Based on the results, they may recommend eating more or less of certain foods to ensure that I have enough energy and do not get tired too often. In addition, they may help me develop the meal options that will be healthy and useful for me, but not too time-consuming to prepare.
Managing my diet and making healthy food choices can also help me to address my sleep problems. For example, avoiding large meals and caffeine late in the day will increase my chances of going to bed earlier (Tandon et al., 2020). Another option I have is reducing the screen time before going to bed, as using electronic devices often delays the time I go to sleep (Tandon et al., 2020). For this, I can use various resources, such as applications that automatically switch off or block the phone at a pre-set time. Establishing proper sleep patterns will improve my brain performance, increasing many of its functions, such as learning, memory, and creativity (Tandon et al., 2020). In turn, a healthy diet will help me to prevent a wide range of chronic illnesses, such as diabetes or heart disease. Moreover, improved nutrition will provide me with all the essential vitamins and minerals and ensure hormonal balance. Therefore, while these changes may seem insignificant, they can help to make important changes to my lifestyle and assist in moving toward wellness.
References
Firth, J., Gangwisch, J. E., Borsini, A., Wootton, R. E., & Mayer, E. A. (2020). Food and mood: How do diet and nutrition affect mental wellbeing?BMJ, 1-4. Web.
Oliver, M. D., Baldwin, D. R., & Datta, S. (2018). Health to wellness: A review of wellness models and transitioning back to health. The International Journal of Health, Wellness, and Society, 9(1), 41-56. Web.
Patel, S. E., & Chrisman, M. (2020). Incivility through the continuum of nursing: A concept analysis. Nursing Forum, 55(2), 267-274. Web.
Tandon, A., Kaur, P., Dhir, A., & Mäntymäki, M. (2020). Sleepless due to social media? Investigating problematic sleep due to social media and social media sleep hygiene.Computers in Human Behavior, 113, 106487. Web.