Personal Responsibility: A Plan to Promote Healthy Practices - Essay Example

Health departments, welfare agencies and other concerned people are considering the awareness of health risking factors and behaviors as a bridge to a prosperous and healthy life. However, the awareness does not ensure healthy activities and behaviors. It is a person’s accountability and responsibility for his/her own health which may promote healthier and happier society. For a healthy nation, everyone has to be personally responsible for his/her own health. Once the population at large, starts taking personal responsibility in regards to health care, the nation would become less prone to disease and health risking factors.

Many educational and awareness programs have been established to make people aware of the health risking factors. There interventions and awareness programs, however, are limited in their reach due to unavailability of schooling, education and other sources to everyone around the country. Moreover, knowing something does not ensure practical applicability of that knowledge. These interventions, efforts and programs limit their reach to the knowledge phenomenon and lacks practicality of that knowledge. . “According to the CDC, about 300,000 people per year -- 25,000 per month, 5,769 per week, 821 per day, 34 per hour--die of obesity.

” (Ray, 2009) This clearly shows the failure of such campaigns as the people do not take personal responsibility for their acts with regards to their health. Personal responsibility, according to some researchers, has nothing or less to do with the increasingly deteriorated healthcare situation in the state. No less than half of the American population is caught with one or the other sort of chronic disease. The statistics reveals that almost $2 trillion or 15% of our Gross Domestic Product is spent in medical care (Interlandi, 2009).

The personal responsibility has less to do with this statistics, as critics believe, because there are factors like education, social status, income levels, pollution, increasing cheap and easily available fast food, advertisements and over hygienic environment that one cannot change by taking personal responsibility (Interlandi, 2009). The deterioration of one’s health is, hence, reliant on factors that are out of one’s own scope of actions and behaviors. The secondhand smoke may also result in the emergence of a lung cancer, which is not an intentional act of a person breathing under such an environment.

However, the studies reveal that lung cancer is more probable to contract among those who smoke than those who do not. A personal responsibility acceptance on the part of individuals will help in reducing the smoking rates in the society, hence, the chances of breathing secondhand smoke will also reduce. The individualistic efforts made to reduce pollution will also lead to lesser health risking pollutants in the environment, a personal responsibility to educate and