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It's time to Be a Force for Health
Dr. Robert Gillio • Mar 16, 2020
Dr. Rob's Call to action as Citizen Health Advocates...it's time to Be a Force for Health...
Our personal actions will determine who gets sick and even if they will recover. The government cannot act fast enough to be prepared for all disasters. It is an impossible job and relies on the action on the local level to have a nation that is safe. The early lack of testing blocked the standard ability of proven techniques such as identifying the infected person, then tracking down, treating, and isolating the rest of us from those that were exposed. Instead, we have a local situation that is unknown with very high or maybe minimal risk. This has led to a level of stress and panic, or a disinterest and skepticism in all the reports, and hype from the press and our leaders. We must look out for ourselves and our neighbors and trust in our knowledge and training, wisdom, or experiences and use common sense. But what should we do and why? It is a question many are asking. I suggest we take action as a community centered on the care of all people starting with you. You must stay healthy and calm to help others. The world is in a bit of chaos. We cannot change the world but we can make a difference locally.
Local has a new meaning now. Local means mitigating the hazards, not at the volcano, chemical factory, dam, railroad tracks, flood levees or other risk sites but at the new local risk threat. Local means your home, your hands, and your cough. The person needs to be part of the solution with a radical change in all of our behaviors and be radically healthy in our actions…we must not share our germs and not bring other people’s germs into our homes, nor take the germs from our homes to other people. It is not a mosquito that is the vector for encephalitis, or the skunk for rabies….it is us that are the vectors of disease this time with the new corona strain and its Covid-19 disease. We need to mitigate on the intensely local level of our own bodies and behaviors and do it now. We need “Virus Safe Zone”s or “ForceFields” around us.
What is the rush? If we and all of our neighbors don’t reduce spread, it can go through a community quickly with a surge of cases. It is already here in our mobile society. We have been or will be exposed. If that surge exceeds the medical capacities, then the ability to care for people degrades dramatically. Hospital workers fatigue, mistakes happen, and they get exposed, sick, and can’t help. Medications, IV’s, and life-saving ventilators for those that need support through the pneumonia phase are not available to some and they will suffer or die unnecessarily. Our responsibility is to step up and slow the wave of infection in the community with our actions. If it slows and we “flatten the curve” then the system can care optimally for people and everyone gets the care they need.
Where did the research behind this theory come from. In part, from the work of Richard Hatchett, at the NIH in his studies in 2007. In that study, his team found that social distancing made a statically significant difference in cases and surge excesses leading to less disease and higher survival rates in cities that did it and did it early. The people acted without testing kits, drugs, IV’s, or protective gear. They socially distanced and stayed home from the gatherings for a few weeks and the killer flu died off because it had no one’s body to live in because they didn’t get exposed. They, the people made the difference.
When Hurricane Katrina happened, in many ways the community was the teens in PA, MS and New Orleans that stepped up to stabilize the community. Out of that success came the Force for Health Program. As the catastrophe lead to recovery, it was the teens that become the health literate activators for empowerment of each other, and remediation of social determinants and infrastructure issues. They taught health in schools, addressed social issues, and helped screen and refer within their own families for PTSD counseling and blood pressure remediation. Ironically, those youth impressed Dr. Hatchett enough that he involved me in finding help from ordinary students to go through 1000’s of pages of newspaper archives from 1918 to create the data that supported his study. My daughter, Anna, and myself are proud to be acknowledged as helping with this study. We the people, helped advance understanding of something that is now influencing the outcome of this pandemic. Here is a link to the article where average citizens are in the acknowledgments and the results guided the world.
This is a call to action. I am asking all people to be a force for health for themselves first, and then for others. Take immediate action to listen to the recommendations and immediately change your behavior to be radically healthy with your hygiene and actions. We will help.
Join the Be the Force Challenge, and quickly Learn it, Live it, and Share it as you protect yourself, your family, your community very directly, and your government and the world’s health and economy indirectly. At www.betheforce.health, we will be providing a platform of knowledge, skills, resources, and interaction that will allow you to join and advance a Pop UP Health cultural phenomenon. Can you accelerate the removal of this threat in crisis? If you don’t, the crisis will worsen. Take personal responsibility and be the force that advanced the worlds health, starting with join at the site right now, then washing your hands after they were all over your keyboard or phone screen.
We the people are a Force for Health but in this case, only if we all become part of this anti-viral movement and help it go viral.
#betheforce.health. #citizenshiphealth #coronavirus #STEM
New Paragraph
The Marstronaut in Training program will begin this spring, starting to prepare middle and high school students for a career that could include being one of the first astronauts on Mars....a Marstronaut. You might want to watch as we humans land there today with NASA broadcasting beginning at 230 eastern.
Photo Credit CSPAN. VIDEO link. TEDTalks Young people are a Force for CHANGE.... Let's have the courage to realize that in our moments of darkness..."there is always light if only we are brave enough to see it, if only we are brave enough to be it." Its time, young people, to "merge mercy with might, and might with right" and do the right thing to help us show compassion for all, and protect each other leading with the light of our example to wear the mask, get the shot, feed the hungry, and be kind as we come out of this challenge by making it the opportunity to create a new movement.. Be the force for health, for safety, for kindness, for change. Connect withJoin us at @ Betheforce.health .
PHOTO AND GRAPHIC CREDIT: DR. JAY BHATT HEALTH EQUITY IS A COMPLEX ISSUE. If you are not healthy, it's hard to help others or make change. Taking personal responsibility to understand issues YOU CAN CONTROL is crucial. Learn about health literacy social determinants of health, and the history of racism in America with the free Force for Health Advance the Dream Basics Group. Join and take more responsibility for your own health outcomes controlling the things you can as you work for change. #theforceforhealth #advance the dream JOIN HERE
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