MAINTAINING GOOD HEALTH: IT'S BORING, BUT NECESSARY

Okay, Bill Logan admits it: maintaining good health is boring, but it's important.

Logan is fitness and wellness coordinator at St. Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau. As such, he's well acquainted with the statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service that say most deaths are caused by factors that can be avoided.

"What I'm saying is, we can prevent mortality by proper lifestyle modification," Logan said. "Lifestyle problems cause about 51 percent of the deaths currently."

Those factors, Logan said, include smoking, poor nutrition, alcohol and drug use, lack of blood pressure control, and obesity.

Maintaining good health, he said, amounts to three things: good nutrition and the proper amount of rest and exercise.

"I know it's boring," he added, "but that's basically what it is. The whole key to the thing is prevention of health problems."

By taking these steps, Logan said, people not only benefit physically, but also mentally. "They appear to also feel more positive about life in general," he said.

Debbie Leoni, wellness coordinator at Southeast Missouri Hospital's Fitness and Wellness Center at 208 Linda, said entire families now are committed to health maintenance.

Also, greater numbers of elderly people are keeping active through exercise, she added.

"Our schools are getting away from offering as much (physical education) and our kids are sitting more," she said. "So our generation is going, `Wait a minute, this isn't good.'"

Leoni said that although children too often spend their time in front of a television playing video games, such physical sluggishness is waning.

"They still do that, but I think that parents are becoming more conscious that that's not the best thing for their long-term health," she said.

Leoni said elderly people are "active and moving. They're not rocking-chair seniors. There's just a lot more vivacious people."

Southeast's wellness center offers programs for the community, corporations, and the hospital's employees," she said. It has three full-time wellness specialists and about 10 contracted people who have backgrounds in wellness education and related fields.

Center representatives visit corporations and stores to extend services like cholesterol screenings. Or people come to the Work Place Industrial Medicine facility, also at 208 Linda, to have the tests done, Leoni said.

The wellness center also offers health risk appraisals, enrolls people into exercise programs, and performs conditional employment evaluations for companies, she said.

Leoni said the employment evaluations gauge risks and problems associated with various types of work. The employee is then given advice on the best way to perform their job free of injury or other health risks.

For example, if the job involves lifting, the person would be advised on safe ways to lift, Leoni said.

"If someone has a heart-disease risk, they don't get denied employment, but we'll say, `we want you to work long and so do (your employers), so here are some things you can do,'" she said.

Leoni said the center also provides on-site educational programs. Earlier this month, Leoni presented three such corporate programs on quitting smoking.

Logan said St. Francis offers stress and blood cholesterol tests for people who want to begin exercise programs. The hospital also offers a "Freedom from Smoking" program and recently finished a weight modification program called "Lifestyle Changes for a Healthier You," he said.

The hospital also supplies supportive braces for workers whose jobs require twisting, turning, and lifting. Logan said that although the braces sometimes can be expensive, they are a good investment in some businesses.

"All you have to do is avoid one back problem in a workmen's compensation claim and you've paid for a hundred people using those belts," he said.

Most companies offer wellness programs for their employees to keep down health costs and to keep their employees healthy. A third of St. Francis Medical Center's employees, or about 350, are in fitness programs at Health South, formerly the Human Performance Center at 28 Mt. Auburn Road, Logan said.

He said people who exercise aerobically three days a week have 14.5 percent fewer insurance claims than people who don't exercise at all. "Those who don't smoke have 18 percent less claims," he said.

The statistics, Logan said, are from the book "Health Risk and Behavior: The Impact on Medical Costs."

A recent news report claimed that health care costs paid by automobile manufacturers add 9 to 10 percent to the cost of an automobile made in the United States, he said.