Keeping the doctor away(2)

Promoting general well-being

Liu Ming (pseudonym), a man in his 20s, consulted a health maintenance professional last year to help with his recovery after undergoing liposuction. Before the liposuction, Liu was struggling with obesity. He had ballooned to over 140 kilograms, and he was experiencing a number of other health and social problems related to his obesity.

"Because of my obesity, I couldn't find a girlfriend, and I was beginning to have a number of other health complications, such as high blood pressure and fatty liver disease," he said.

Liu weighed just 90 kilograms after his liposuction, but often felt dizzy and weak. He recalls nearly fainting in the street on several occasions while walking to work.

"I started to realize that my health problems were not only to do with being overweight, but related to my poor physical condition in general and my lifestyle as a whole," said Liu. "That's when I started to adopt the idea of health maintenance."

After consulting a health maintenance professional, Liu started exercising to build his core strength and to reduce his resting heart rate. Closely monitoring a number of basic health indicators, he adapted the exercises he was doing based on the changes in his physiology.

After a year, his resting heart rate had dropped from over 95 bpm to a healthy level of around 80 bpm and his blood pressure had fallen from 160/110 to 145/100. He had gone from feeling weak and overweight, to being fit and athletic.

"I'll be taking part in the Beijing Marathon next month," he said.

From cradle to grave

"Health maintenance is about one's well-being over an entire lifetime, from cradle to grave," said Niu Wenyi, deputy director of social medicine and health education at Peking University in comments made to the Life Times.

Niu said that the earlier one started paying attention to signs that revealed one's general health condition the better.

"Health maintenance is most effective if it starts when a person is still a child or an adolescent, when he or she is still in a period of physical growth and development," she said.

The same report stated that at present, only 1 in every 360,000 people under the age of 18 had received professional health maintenance advice in the country.

To help fill this gap, ACMEWAY, a Beijing-based health and sports science consultancy, has recently implemented health maintenance programs that are specifically aimed at teenagers and adolescents.

"Health maintenance has four basic components," said Xu Junhua, manager of ACMEWAY. "Exercise, nutrition, psychology and lifestyle."

When the company was founded in 2002, it had focused only on assessing criteria for an individual's fitness, said Xu.

"But after the State Council issued a statement in 2013 encouraging the development of the health industry, we began to shift our service from assessment to intervention," said Xu.

Still too vague

Li Keqiang, a health maintenance professional who works at a private clinic, said that there were still too many vagaries at this early stage of the health maintenance industry in China.

"The industry has not been well-managed by the State, and we are all kind of confused," said Li. "There are a lot of people who are unqualified to give advice but have latched onto the term health maintenance to try to make a quick profit. Some of them are even pyramid schemes."

Consequently, a lot of people like Zhai have had to resort to using health maintenance strategies on their own.

"I would like to have a health maintenance professional for my daughter, for myself, and for my other family members," said Zhai. "But at the moment, the industry standards are quite vague, and I haven't been able to find a 100 percent qualified and officially accredited health maintenance professional."

To help people who want to improve their general well-being by keeping a personal health record, Feng Qing, a health maintenance professional in Shanghai, offered some useful tips.

Firstly, she said that people should keep a record of their blood pressure, blood fat, blood sugar and body weight. Having an ongoing record can reveal trends about a person's health, and can be helpful for doctors if one does fall ill.

Secondly, she said that it was important to pay attention to one's diet, and to reduce sugars, fats and foods with high calorie contents.

"A person's diet is the most important part in health maintenance," said Feng.

Finally, Feng suggested that people should exercise regularly to keep fit. She said it was good to stick to a training plan, and to focus on fitness goals that were appropriate to the person's general physical condition.

"Our role is to make suggestions and create plans for people to live a healthy lifestyle, rather than curing diseases," said Feng. "The healthier and more conscientious you are about your health, the less you have to do to maintain it."