NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HEALTH: HEALTH PROMOTION

As the objectives from the Healthy People (the Surgeon General’s plan) documents prompted action to promote health and prevent premature disability through social, environmental, policy-related, and community-based programming, a new emphasis on individual behavior change began to emerge. However, making behavior changes without help is not easy. The term health promotion began to be used to describe the educational, organizational, procedural, environmental, social, and financial supports that help individuals and groups reduce negative health behaviors and promote positive change. Persons who engage successfully in health-promoting behaviors actively use services and supports that can help them improve or maintain good health. Health promotion programs, for instance, don't simply say "Just do it" when providing advice to quit smoking. Instead, they provide information about risk behaviors and possible consequences to smokers and their side-stream smoke victims (educational supports); they encourage smokers to participate in smoking cessation classes and allow time off for worker attendance, or they set up buddy systems of social supports to help them (organizational supports); they establish rules governing smokers' behaviors and supporting their decisions to change, such as bans on smoking in the workplace and removal of cigarettes from vending machines (environmental supports); and they provide monetary incentives to motivate people to participate (financial supports).

Health promotion programs identify healthy people who are engaging in risk behaviors, or behaviors that increase susceptibility to negative health outcomes, and attempt to motivate them to change their behaviors. Health promotion programs encourage those whose health and wellness behaviors are already sound to maintain and improve them. By attempting to modify behaviors, increase skills, change attitudes, increase knowledge, influence values, and improve health decision making, health promotion goes well beyond the simple information campaign. By basing programs and services in communities, organizations, schools, and other places where most people spend their time, health promotion increases the likelihood of long-term success on the road to health and wellness.

Whether we use the term health or wellness, we are talking about a person's overall responses to the challenges of living. Occasional dips into the ice cream bucket and other dietary slips, failures to exercise every day, flare-ups of anger, and other deviations from optimal behavior should not be viewed as major failures. Actually, the ability to recognize that each of us is an imperfect being, attempting to adapt in an imperfect world, signals individual well-being.

We must also remember to be tolerant of others who are attempting to improve their health. Rather than be warriors against pleasure in our zeal to change the health behaviors of others, we need to be supportive, understanding, and non-judgmental. Health bashing - intolerance or negative feelings, words, or actions aimed at people who fail to meet our own expectations of health - may indicate our own deficiencies in the psychological, social, and/or spiritual dimensions of the health continuum.

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