Let's Get Physical

Recently my friend Peter told me about a workout he completed at our Field House.   

Peter is crazy fit.  Right now he is on the other side of the world on a five-week hiking holiday.  He runs, skis (alpine, backcountry, cross-country, heli...), hikes, portages, canoes...  This workout wasn’t really for his benefit.  One of his friends had a heart attack.  Once the crisis was managed, Peter’s friend was referred to Saskatoon Health Region’s Livewell Cardiac Rehabilitation Program.   One of the program requirements is that you need to bring a workout partner with you.  And that’s how Peter got to the Fieldhouse the other day. 

The Saskatoon Health Region Livewell Cardiac Rehabilitation program has a long history (over forty years!) of offering supervised graduated exercise to people with active coronary artery disease.  If you live within our health region, have angina or have had a heart attack, heart surgery, or heart stents, you will be referred to the Cardiac Rehab program which is supervised by doctors, nurses and kinesiologists.  Dieticians, pharmacists, physiotherapists, social workers, physicians and, probably most importantly, other people living with heart disease will support you.  You will learn how to safely increase your activity and exercise endurance all while working out at a world class facility. 

Saskatoon Health Region also offers similar programs for people with COPD, heart failure, diabetes, and strokes. And it’s affordable: $25 a month and for that you get to go three times a week. These programs have helped hundreds, if not thousands, of patients improve their activity levels, their health, and their quality of life.  What Peter pointed out to me that we don’t offer any similar preventative programs for all those people who don’t yet have a chronic disease.  You have to develop complications of a chronic disease before we encourage and support you.  A single drop-in rate for unsupervised use of the same Field House is $8.30.  A month pass is $67.  (BTW Clopidogrel (aka Plavix) is $100 a month in Canada.  Most patients with active coronary artery disease are on clopidogrel along with at least three or four other drugs). 

What if we prescribed exercise to our patients? This approach has been proven to be effective at increasing activity levels and quality of life.  Several communities in Alberta are starting to look at this approach also.  What if we chose to pay for access to a trainer, a dietician, a yoga class?  As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  It seems like we are coming at the problem of chronic disease management more than a little too late.