June 2019 Newsletter

Canadian Men’s Health Week (June 10-16th)

Canadian Men’s Health week is celebrated the week leading up to Father’s Day.  This week is dedicated to raising awareness of preventable health issues.  It promotes living a healthy lifestyle by being proactive with early detection and treatment of disease in men.

New research shows that 72% of Canadian men demonstrate 2-3 unhealthy habits.  This could be in the form of a poor diet, smoking cigarettes, excessive drinking, not getting enough sleep or not exercising regularly.  An even more mind boggling statistic is that 70% of chronic health conditions are caused by lifestyle, not genetics, which means a lot of them are preventable.  

Genetics you can’t do much about, but modifying your lifestyle you can.  It can be very easy to neglect your health when you work full-time, have families, daily stressors or just lack of time.  By changing some simple habits, huge benefits can be achieved.  Something as simple as:

– Eating a healthy breakfast, or eating one at all, will help start the day off in the right direction.  

• Playing with your children or grandchildren.
• Taking the stairs
• Parking further away from the building
• Doing yard work
• Playing a sport
• Getting regular check ups from your doctor
• Doing the recommended tests such as a PSA or cholesterol panel when appropriate 
• Drinking water instead of soda
• Eating a type of fish or seafood in place of red meat once per week

Canada’s Men’s Health Foundation has some really helpful tools. You can test where you stand health wise with a quick and easy test on their website.  It is free, 100% confidential and provides you with your areas of risk, what you need to know and what you can do to improve.  It takes about 5 minutes to complete.  To take the test, click here!  

They also provide a Maintenance Guide to tell you when certain tests are recommended based on your age.  It is broken down by your age: 20-39, 40-54 and 55+.  There are also some helpful ‘Did You Know’ stats.  To see what you should be having done each year, click here!

Infographic courtesy of Canadian Men’s Health Foundation

Canadians Leaving Canada For Medical Care (Newsletter)

Did you know that in 2017 there was a reported 217,500 Canadians that left the country for health care according to Statistics Canada?  We spent $690 million on medical care, $1.9 million per day, in other countries.  Numbers like this are baffling.  Why are the numbers of Canadians leaving for medical care increasing?

Lack of Doctors

In the Maritimes alone, there are 175,000 people waiting and without a family doctor.  In Ontario, it was reported that 1.3 million are without access to primary care.  This poses huge issues and contributes to the overcrowding in the ER’s but more importantly, is a bigger problem when it comes time for follow up and that person doesn’t have anyone to follow up with.  It puts people between a rock and a hard place.

Other scenario’s include the wait time to see a specialist or to have a diagnostic test done.  Some of the doctor’s offices we’ve contacted have a recording on their voicemail, ‘If you are in need of a referral to Dr. XYZ, there is an 18 month wait to see him.’  (One of the Neurologists’ message indicated 24 months!)   Talk about discouraging.  If you are in pain, who wants to wait that long for someone to address it?  

Operating Rooms & Diagnostic Machines Rationed

In 2018, a report was done and looked at 15 hospitals in Quebec that had the longest wait times for MRI & CT Scans.  This study found that the majority of the machines were operating far below capacity.  

In theory, these machines should be operating 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.  On average, only 6 of the machines were running approximately 8 hours a day.  Meanwhile, 7,000 people were  on the waitlist to have a scan.  

Due to budget constraints, operating rooms are not booked to full capacity either.  There may be an OR room, surgical team, and surgeon available, however, that surgeon is only allowed to do so many surgeries per week.  When you see the numbers of how many people are leaving for medical care, these reasons noted above may very well be part of the cause.

Happy Father’s Day!

Teacher to all

Fearless leader

Everyday hero

Ringmaster to the circus

Foundation of the family

New dads, old dads, step-dads, granddads, father in laws, military dads, goofball dads…there are a million fatherly types out there.  What ever category you fall under, Happy Father’s Day!

Health Vantis is briefly saying goodby to their newsletter for the summer, however, our business will still be open.  We will resume the newsletter September 2019.  We hope everyone has a happy, healthy and safe summer!!! Looking forward to catching up in a couple of months.

*If there are topics you’d like to see in our upcoming issues, please send us your ideas.  We love hearing from you!