“Healthy information for healthy Hearts”- Dr. Babs-Mothe
A new concept of dealing with heart issues
Matters of the Heart came to me as an inspiration, about 12 years ago, after seeing the epidemics of heart disease and deaths from heart-related disease which has been at a pandemic proportion for over 40 years. Anytime someone dies, particularly a close family or friend; I often observed the cause of death was related to a heart condition or disease. I was challenged to see that major killers of men and women are easily preventable problems like heart attacks, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, peripheral vascular disease and stress. I also noticed, from my training, that the heart works by delivering blood through the blood vessels and so the condition of our vessels are important to the proper functioning of our hearts and even all the organs of the body. What we eat and our lifestyles have direct impact on our vessels, hearts and indirectly on all organs of the body. I therefore propose that if we take care of “Matters of the Heart;” our overall health will be in perfect shape.
Identification of the problems
Talking to various people from different backgrounds, rich and poor, educated and illiterates, I found out that the problem was more of habit and behavior rather than knowledge, a lot of people have the correct information, majority have the knowledge, but only a few people do the right thing, why? There are very few role models to show us how to do things the right way and old habit die hard. To change an already learned behavior is hard, Julie Donley, created an acronym for H. A. R. D, she called Habit, Attachment, Resistance and Discouragement. Exercise had not been accepted as a necessity and most people just enjoy the taste of food, not minding whether it is injurious to the heart or not. The food-heart connection is still a myth. Chubby babies are regarded as healthy babies; oversized men and women are regarded as special, sexy and attractive. It is largely believed that the best way to a man’s heart is through his belly. To keep your man, you must feed him well. All these habits continue to endanger our hearts and health.
Early Intervention approach to Matters of the Heart described.
With everything we do, achieve and hope to accomplish in life, our hearts deserve a special treatment, the understanding of which would allow us to maximize our heart potentials, the food we eat, how the stresses of life, financial and relationships all have tremendous effects on the heart. I mean our physical heart! “The Early Intervention approach to Matters of the Heart4”
(EI- Mothe) was described ten years ago, specifically on April 5th of 2012 to give us strategies to keep our hearts healthy. We started a regular Thursday meeting where “healthy information was provided for healthy hearts” for about 20 minutes on a weekly basis, followed by exercises (flexibility, aerobics and strengthening exercises) were done for another 40 minutes. People were then encouraged to go back home and reproduce what they learned. This idea became popular, and the meeting attendance started to increase on a weekly basis. The goal was to join other workers in this field to stem down the pandemic nature of heart disease which continues to be no 1 killer of men and women across the globe. (About 2 million people in the Americas alone die every year from heart related problems, 4.5 million in Europe, 1.3 millions in Africa, 3.6 million in South East Asia, 1.2 million in the Middle east and of 4.7 million in the West Pacific totaling about 17 million worldwide (WHO, 2008 figures ).
Matters of the Heart have demonstrated practically, that with simple lifestyle changes that are doable and achievable, we can chase the monster of untimely death and disability out of our community. Early Intervention approach to Matters of the Heart teaches ordinary people how to exercise rightly at home, churches and workplace; how to eat right and provide the right type of education capable of transforming lives. We decided that we would say goodbye to hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and heart attack and thereby saving all the health care reform money. (Cardiovascular disease costs the National Health Service in the UK nearly £15 billion annually and about $300 billon in the US per year.
After giving couple of these life transforming lectures at churches, retreats, events and homes, someone decided to sponsor the Matters of the heart’s website and so I started to publish at the www.mothe.us. Every week, I will post a heart- related article that I wrote or any one written by another reputable author after reviewing and finding that it would benefit our members. Testimonies started to come from people who had lost some weight, others who were getting excellent results from their doctors; their heart numbers like blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol numbers started to change for the better. I therefore started to put the idea of Early Intervention approach to Matters of the Heart in a book.