Category Archives: Sir Muir Gray

Fitness

The Actual Rate of Decline is faster than the Best Possible Rate of Decline, that is the rate of decline due solely to the ageing process and the difference between the two is the Fitness Gap. Both the point at which physical decline starts, and the rate at which it proceeds is for the first few decades determined by loss of fitness, and loss of fitness is determined by social factors, namely by the decisions people make about their life and the pressures which influence them decreases

Worry Less

The Ageing Process is normal, biological and not pathological, and nothing can be done about it, for the present at least. But this does not mean that you should despair. On the contrary, you need to understand what is happening to you and how the three processes that cause much more trouble than ageing, at least before the age of ninety can be countered, how their impact can be reduced and how many of their effects can be reversed

Benefits of Walking

We monitor the evidence base for the benefits and harms of walking and funded two comprehensive reviews which are reproduced below. In 2012 William Buckland, the Director of the National Campaign for Walking produced a report for Public Health England and the Ramblers which reinforced the strength of the evidence base – the evidence is very strong that the benefits are considerable and the risks negligible

Dr Gray’s Walking Cure

Exercise! exercise! exercise! what do these words conjure up? The gym, sweat, leotards, slimming, living longer, getting fitter, obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart disease. Take more exercise is the general advice but how should this be done easily, enjoyably and cheaply? Daily walking as the answer hardly gets a look-in when the different options are considered, but it is the simplest, most freely available, and medically by far the best of all possible answers. Walking is the way mankind has kept fit for purpose ever since evolutionary times. The reasons why we don’t do it enough in developed countries now is because we have made it just too easy NOT to do it. This book sets a challenge, which you can easily achieve – to walk 1,000,000 EXTRA steps between 2009 and 2013 – revolutionising your daily life, your health, and your carbon footprint.

Public Health Experience: Why Submit Case Study?

Harvesting Tacit Knowledge

It is generally agreed that we have neglected the knowledge derived from experience, focusing instead on the knowledge derived from the analysis of routinely collected data, stats or information, and knowledge derived from research, namely evidence.

This is a resource of vital importance and a resource that will grow. It is expected that each Public Health professional will submit a case report each year and this will be kept as a closed resource to encourage people to describe their failures as well as their successes. It is hoped that professionals will report on the projects that did not go so well as well as on those that were highly successful, for there is a proverb in management that we learn more from out mistakes than our successes. There is another proverb that says that although it is important not to re-invent the wheel, it is sometimes necessary, but what is really important is that we do not re-invent the flat tyre.

Essential Books for Public Health Professionals Working in Healthcare

How To Talk About Books You Have Not Read is a wonderful book by Pierre Bayard. The book can be read at two different levels as many books can. On one level it is a humorous book, a little like the book by Stephen Potter called One-Up-Manship, which has advice on how to impress people with one’s literary credentials even though one has never read the classics. Pierre Bayard, however, makes a very serious point – that no one will ever read all the books that they need to read or could read in their particular topic. It is far more important to know about a book and its core message, preferably in the author’s own words, and to understand how that book fits into the culture and relates to other books and concepts then not to know that a book existed.

Essential Terms for Public Health Professionals working in Healthcare

Language creates reality, it does not describe it. That is one of the principles that has emerged from anthropology, linguistics and philosophy from authors as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Searle and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Confusion about language and the meaning of the terms being used is one of the main causes of arguments, fruitless arguments, which disappear if everyone shares the same understanding of the terms being used.

Public Health Essentials

One of the complaints people make about Public Health is that every public health professional seems to describe it in a different way when asked. This is necessarily so, to a degree. The Director of Public Health or a Consultant in Public Health in an inner city is likely to have a different set of priorities and problems than doing a job with the same title in a West Country rural population. We need people to understand that public health is a type of professional practice that is adaptive and is practised differently in different contexts. However the criticism has some substance too. If you were to ask twenty public health professionals to write down what they meant by ‘deprivation’ or ‘well being’ or the difference between ‘quality’ and ‘value’ then, at present, you would get very different results. Similarly if you were to ask people what the ten most important texts that they studied training you would get different results.