Free Essay Example - Role of Nutrition and Diet

Nutrition and diet play a fundamental role in a person's growth and development, and the prevention of lifestyle diseases. When complemented with exercises, diet helps a person attain and keep a healthy body weight, decrease the risk of contracting chronic illnesses like heart disease, and elevate general wealth. Unhealthy nutritional habits are the cause of obesity in the US. Nutrition helps people boost their body's immunity to fight diseases. A healthy, balanced diet contains water, minerals, vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates, and fibers (Case-Lo, 2017). Healthy nutrition helps people avoid developing nutritional diseases like scurvy which occurs due to insufficiency of vitamin C and rickets due to inadequate vitamin D. Carbohydrates are the main sources of energy, and can be obtained from fruits, vegetables, glucose, and fructose. Protein is the structural and functional constituents of every cell and can be obtained from meat, milk, fish, and eggs.

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Therapeutic Touch

During a therapeutic touch, the therapists put their limbs on or near the patient's body while intending to help or to heal. By doing this the therapists trust that they are knowingly modulating the patient's energy by interacting with the patient's energy field. The emphasis is to balance the patient's energy and trigger the body's own natural healing. Therapeutic touch is based on assumptions that a person is an open energy system that is in constant interactions with itself and the surrounding environment, the disease is an imbalance in a person's energy field and balancing the field restores health, and that all humans have the capability to naturally heal as well as promote the healing of others (Bach, 2016). Therapeutic touch and massage are similar in that they involve touching the body. While most of the time massage is meant for relaxation and promotes the flow of blood, it is also used to enhance the healing of injuries and anxiety.

Cognitive styles and diseases

A person's cognitive styles affect the vulnerability to illnesses and depression. People with negative thoughts about life have been seen to suffer from illnesses and depression. Depression and anxiety are seen as the product of individuals' interactions with their environment. Depression is obtained by attaching a stimulus to a pessimistic emotional status. When people experience an adverse effect and later internal pain, this increases their vulnerability to depression. Depressed people are hopeless, feel insufficient and valueless, and observe the world and things therein in a negative manner. According to McLeod (2015), negative cognitive styles makes people always blame themselves and magnify their problem, which expands their likelihood of getting diseases. The strategies to avoid such negative thoughts about oneself include parents talking positively about their children, people exploring their emotions, and allowing tears to flow outward and also people sharing their pain with others.

Cancer and Personality

Traditionally, it was believed that people who had some personality traits like introverts and neurotic people were more likely to contract cancer. Many studies conducted have failed to reveal such an association, but some studies tended to support the claim. Cancer patients and their relatives may tend to blame themselves for an emotional reaction to the disease, where they feel pressure to have a good attitude. Failure by cancer patients to express their emotions only makes them feel lonely and guilty, which tends to adversely affect them. Such a manifestation implies that people's attitudes have a significant impact on controlling severe chronic illnesses (Goliszek, 2014). From many studies done, there has been no relationship between cancer and attitudes. The studies about psychotherapy provide mixed results, but the most evident conclusion is that attitudes and personality only affect the quality of health. Mental health treatment helps patients and relatives to manage and treat cancer better. The strategies for changing negative attitudes include talking to people when overwhelmed with bad thoughts, seeking the help of support groups, and psychotherapy.

Strategies and Behaviors to optimize the potential for self-healing

Self-healing and wholeness following a catastrophic illness demand for some special conditions. Firstly, it is important to manage the stress and anxiety that accompanies a catastrophic event. Creating a safe environment is the first step in regaining from stress. Noise promotes stress and reducing or cutting noise totally creates a peaceful environment that helps reduce stress. Having the right attitude while using medicine helps your healing progress as seen by the placebo effect. The nocebo effects imply just the opposite. Getting enough rest and sufficient sleeping hours also help the patient enhance self-healing. Meditation has also been noticed to reduce stress and promote self-healing. The other strategy is seeking social support by joining a social group or sharing your grief with friends and relatives. Social support enables sick people to regain strength and urge to push on. Practicing activities that give someone joy helps relieve stress and be positive about life, thus promoting self-healing (Robinson et al., 2019).

Questions to ask a healthcare professional about an illness.

The question to ask the doctor about your disease include: What the illness or condition is; how severe the condition is and how it will affect your life; what the long- and short-term prognosis of the disease are; what initiated the condition or ailment; what signs and symptoms you should watch for; what tests will be involved in the diagnosis; what treatment will be given, its effectiveness and side effects; and the risks about the disease and its treatment. There are factors that may lead to incorrect diagnosis during treatment among them being poor communication when transferring patients amid hospitals or departments, lack of feedback, insufficient support for clinical diagnosis, failure to fund research, insufficient treatment time, and complex treatment processes (Commins, 2018).

References

Bach, M. (2016). Therapeutic touch. https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/therapeutic-touch

Case-Lo, C. (2017, Nov 1). Food & Nutrition. https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition#goodCommins, J. (2018, Sept 13). 6 factors that enable diagnostic errors. https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/clinical-care/6-factors-enable-diagnostic-errors#:~:text=Poor%20handoffs%2C%20lack%20of%20feedback,related%20hospital%20deaths%20each%20year.

Goliszek, A. (2014, Nov 13). Is there a cancer-prone personality? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-the-mind-heals-the-body/201411/is-there-cancer-prone-personality%3famp

McLeod, S. (2015). Psychological theories of depression. https://www.simplypsychology.org/depression.html

Robinson, L., Seagal, J. & Melinda, S. (2019, Oct). Coping with a life-threatening illness or serious health event. https://www.helpguide.org/articles/grief/coping-with-a-life-threatening-illness.htm