General Objectives and Glossary of Terms

for the Global Conference on Health and Lifestyle

Basic values and concepts from WHO’s Alma Ata Declaration:

1. Health is a fundamental human right for all humans.
2. Healthcare should be available to all—universally.
3. Primary healthcare should be based on practical, scientifically sound, and socially acceptable methods.
4. The people have the right and the duty to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their personal health care.
5. The attainment of the highest possible level of health is essential for all.
6. Technology should be made affordable and universally accessible to individuals and families in the community at costs they can afford.
    

General Objectives of the Conference:

1. Examine lifestyle initiatives of wholistic primary health care that aligns with the MDGs, AAD, EHI, MTSP and HP2010.
2. Challenge the traditional medical and religious communities to go beyond usual practices to a more wholistic blend of medicine and faith.
3. Address not only the participants’ acute short-term medical and spiritual needs, but also their long-term mental, social, and environmental needs.
4. Demonstrate how health promoting practices can reduce medical costs while increasing quality of health and spiritual care.
5. Explore prevention education opportunities during treatment, to reduce reoccurrence of injury and infectious diseases.
6. Educate patients and parishioners to exercise their rights and responsibilities in health maintenance.
7. Clarify for the patients the relationship between environmental conditions and health and disease.
8. Integrate health education with effective medical diagnoses and treatments.
9. Explore how chronic or terminal patients may live comfortably and peacefully.
10. Demonstrate individual risks with identifiable disease-producing practices and health-promoting outcomes.
11. Evaluate traditional medical treatments with evidence-based science.
12. Illustrate how simple and practical lifestyle interventions can decrease economic class disparity, child and gender inequalities.
13. Explore the separate but complementary relationships between science and religion in patient care.
     

Glossary of Our Terms:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. WHO 1948
(Some have suggested spiritual should be added and psychosocial should replace mental and social.)

Health is a positive state of physical, psychosocial, and spiritual well-being throughout the lifecycle relatively free of debilitating diseases and impairments.

Primary healthcare means essential healthcare based on practical, scientifically sound, culturally appropriate and socially acceptable methods. (WHO Alma Ata 1978) (Entry level, first contact, first consultation, treating basic needs)

Lifestyle is a way of life or a style of living that reflects the attitudes and values (habits and choices) of a person or a group. (Free Dictionary)

Lifestyle Practices. In this document, we mean choices that either support health or decrease the quality of health, well-being, and measure of health.

Lifestyle practices include, but are not limited to, balanced nutrition/diet, moderate exercise, restful sleep, spiritual contentment and peace, emotional stability, reasonable range of motion. This is in the context of family, friends and relatives, community and church involvement, as well as service, meaningful employment or retirement, and wholistic spiritual values

Lifestyle diseases include but are not limited to chronic diseases related to use of tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs, inactivity, high intake of total fat, saturated fat, refined carbohydrates, low fiber diet. Unmanaged stress, which mitigates premature heart disease, cancer related to poor choices, Type 2 diabetes, and hypertension.

UN's-MDGs - United Nations's Millennium Development Goals

WHO's-AAD - World Health Organization's Alma Ata Declaration

WHO's- MTSP - World Health Organization's Medium Term Strategic Plans

USA-HP2010 - USA Healthy People 2010 Goals and Objectives
 

This page has been updated on 26.10.2008