My name is Doctor Michael Nyemenim. I am a cardiologist and an infectious disease specialist. I have been a health practitioner for almost forty years. It is nice that we have this opportunity to educate ourselves on health issues because as we all know, health is wealth.
The irony, however, is that most of us are ready to spend money in buying ephemeral satisfactions such as houses, clothes, cars but we hardly ever think about our health. The only time we think about our health is when we become dysfunctional.
For example, when we have headaches, we do not really care about consulting the right healthcare providers. At that point, we begin to attribute our inability to take care of ourselves to the economic situations in the country and quickly run to the nearest pharmacy to pick up whatever the unqualified personnel prescribes for us in the name of remedy and we swallow them.
Sometimes, we get lucky and the symptoms are alleviated, and other times we get unlucky and run into complications. That is when we begin to look for the real qualified healthcare practitioners. We hardly think about the level of danger we would have exposed ourselves to and after some years, what is written on the obituary is “A BRIEF ILLNESS” forgetting that the illness may have started years back due to our carelessness.
On this platform, I am going to be reaching out to you my online audience, twice every week and we are going to be discussing a whole lot on health. We shall be looking at health from the social aspect, economic aspect, religious aspect, political aspect, legal aspect and then the medical aspect.
It is interesting for us to do this because we have a predominantly ignorant community when it comes to health matters. This is because the average Nigerian think of health when he/she has a disability or dysfunction.
We often times forget that health is like every other system. What we put in it is what we are getting out of it. We always have this belief that should anything go wrong with us, it is not our responsibility rather someone else must have caused it and this psychology does not allow us to take responsibility of our ill-health or good health. This means we are nonchalant towards issues about health.
We are the ones who 85% or more of the cases, decide if we are going to be healthy or not. Our ill-health has nothing to do with our wicked uncle in the village or that Aunt that moves around at night.
No matter the level of the degeneration of your health, if only you will be willing to take proper care of yourself, you will reap good health but if you refuse to take proper care of yourself, the end may not be so good.
