Health and age

What troubles the parents most when they have a young baby in their lap? Just think! It is his / her health. Because the child can’t speak and hence the responsibility of parents. But when the child grows up and can tell us what he wants, then in reality, we forget about his health and think that disease is the only sign of bad health. Though we try to feed him with the best we can. And if he is weak we resort to doctors. That is it! We are then concerned more with his schooling and career. Though when sick, we don’t spare our time, efforts and money to bring him back to normal health with the best of treatments we can afford. We even want to give him whatever he wants within our approach. But he (the child) doesn’t know that he needs the knowledge and training of health and that of how to keep up the body, with which and in which he has to live the whole life, as importantly as he needs food, clothing, and love from parents. Sadly enough, we ourselves are not aware of this fact. Nor do we have that knowledge and training ourselves. Still the health matters us most. John Brooks has rightly said, “Parents these days scarcely bring up children; they finance them”. This is the stage we all have passed through and have made / are making our children pass through the same stage. How health illiteracy is being passed on from generation to generation!

When grown up and he is his own judge, health starts mattering him / her directly, but only when sick, not otherwise. They become conscious about their physique more than their health. That is the main reason that young boys choose to go to gyms and young girls to beauty parlours to enhance, rather project their physique and beauty; not health.

And at this age, we don’t have time to learn about health because we have so many other things to do – children to look after, career, future plans and so on. And this is the age where resistance of the body is at the peak and hence least care is given. Though this is the age where maximum of the seeds of diseases are sown to be germinated late on. How correctly the picture of this age has been depicted by Harold Coffin, “Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.”

When middle age passes, all the results of our passed life which we lived in illiteracy of health, come up in the form of diseases and ill health in one form or the other. And the old man is dependent on children and others for his treatment or at least for physical assistance. And we listen of many – many parents who have sacrificed even their last penny and property for treatment and regaining the health of their child. But we rarely listen of the children who have gone to that extent for the sake of their parents’ health. Still the health to an old man, naturally, is most important to him as it is to any other person in the world with a difference that he needs physical care or support as well. This is why George Bernard Shaw once said, “Old men are dangerous; it does not matter to them what is going to happen to the world.” It is fact that when a person is in disease, he thinks of his health alone and can’t care with what is happening with the whole world. And the old age is the house of diseases, we all know.

And when we are told of any death, our first question always is whether he was suffering from any illness. And when a person dies without any chronic or serious disease and without any serious troubles or pains, we say, “How fine death he met with!” This is how we have assumed the sickness to be our companion till end.

Considering the extremes, if given a choice, what would you choose for your old age? Perfect health and sound sleep living in a hut? Or a diseased and bed ridden body in a palace with sleepless nights and crying calls to ever ready servants with all the luxuries of life and queue of the best doctors to attend?