Risky Behavior in Diabetes
Until the recent times, infectious diseases occupied their respectful place in the list of dangerous diseases. A few decades ago the dramatic change occurred: according to the statistics, the most deathly health conditions showed to be chronic diseases solely, with the exception of accidents. Healing chronic diseases is more complex than healing infections, as the result depends largely on the patient’s behavior, in contrast to the healing of infections where a doctor’s task is to kill the bacteria (virus).
Until that statistical disposition took place, there had been popular the Western, or the Disease explanatory model of health, according to which the central role in gaining health belongs to a physician, the health is concerned to biomedical factors and is about derangement of underlying physical mechanisms (Martin L., Dimatteo M., 2014). Now, when chronic diseases are found to be the most possible to put a human’s life at risk, the Illness explanatory model of health is gradually gaining popularity, in accordance with which the main power in re-establishing health belongs not to a physician, but a patient and the health is considered as the biopsychological phenomenon.
A chronic disease is a metabolic failure to which led not certain microorganisms present in a human body, but a particular set of patient’s habits and behaviors, and it is changing the patient’s behavior what determines the success of a chronic disease curing. This is why changing behaviors in patients with chronic diseases has become that important relevant question. In the list of the top-10 death causes among Americans, diabetes ranks #5, just after stroke and unintentional accidents and before the homicides, so that it can be concluded that in the U.S. people more often die of diabetes than of homicides, and it is second most popular illness-cause of death after stroke.
Diabetes is a complex metabolic failure that leads to various hard failures in all organ systems: from high-blood pressure that can lead to stroke to neuropathies and blindness. Life with diabetes is not about soon and immediate death, but the growing number of complications, gradually diminishing freedom and the general state getting worse. The growing number of obese people, the large amount of people staying not involved in healthy lifestyles, eating junk food with high concentrations of sugar put the American nation at risk of the epidemic of diabetes and thus – soaring the number of people leading their life in suffer from their health devastating and paying large medical bills in hope that those sufferings will eventually stop. But it is well known, that the only effective means to fight diabetes, as well as many other chronic metabolic diseases is in changing patients’ behaviors. Due to certain specifics in food, culture and lifestyle, African Americans are the most vulnerable to diabetes group in the USA, so that finding strategies of how to prevent the unhealthy lifestyles that lead to diabetes among African Americans is a question of particular importance.
The nature of diabetes
Diabetes, or naming …
