The Relevance of The Health-Illness Continuum (Essay Sample)

Health-Illness Continuum
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Introduction
The Health-Illness continuum is an illustration that suggests that the well-being of a person is comprised of mental awareness, emotional health, and the condition of whether a person has a disease or not. Individual health status varies from time to time, with an individual being physically okay at one instance and suffering from an illness in another. In a healthcare setting, a patient's health condition has to be monitored, and the patient is also given proper counsel to aid in their full recovery. Moreover, healthcare practitioners have to help patients discover their innovation and motivation to lead them to better health (Gochman,2013). The health-illness continuum helps healthcare professionals analyze and comprehend various health challenges and develop methods that efficiently solve health issues.
Moreover, the health-illness continuum helps healthcare professionals guide their patients on the right path to recovery and monitoring their health progress. The significant roles that the health-illness continuum plays in successful healthcare provision emphasize the importance of understanding the health-illness continuum. The paper will discuss the health-illness continuum and its relevance to patient care.
The relevance of The Health-Illness Continuum
The health-illness continuum is among the methods utilized by healthcare practitioners in advising patients about their health and how to manage various health challenges successfully. According to (Smeltzer et al., 2010), healthcare professionals understand that two major standards ensure a patient's restoration to full health, treatment standards, and wellness standards. The standards meet at what is referred to as the neutral point. The health-illness continuum links both standards used in patient restoration to health, thus proving vital in helping nurses achieve their goal of leading patients to more optimal health levels.
The term health-illness continuum is also used interchangeably with the term illness-wellness continuum. The health-illness continuum illustration categorizes an individual's health into six components: physical, emotional, mental, social, environmental, and spiritual health-the six components of health work harmoniously in ensuring the ideal well-being of an individual. The ideal optimal health, as noted by (LeMone et al., 2015), goes beyond the physical health of an individual, which focuses on how well an individual's body systems are functioning. Many factors play a role in developing an illness; if an individual solely focuses on a single component of health while neglecting the others, the individual is highly prone to developing illnesses compared to individuals who make conscious efforts in checking all the components of health. Thus, the health-illness continuum provides an excellent paradigm for patients and healthcare provisioners to follow when assessing and understanding the origins of the health issues negatively affecting a patient and hindering the process of recovery. Furthermore, health-illness continuum also guides healthcare professionals in helping patients manage their health challenges effectively.
The health-illness continuum plays a crucial role in helping healthcare professionals broaden their perspective and approach treatment and healing of illnesses. According to (Smeltzer et al., 2010), the health-continuum challenges the assumption within healthcare circles that restoring an individual's body to optimal physical functioning means that the patient is fully healthy. The health-illness continuum illustration helps health provisioners understand that treating patients only move patients to the neutral point or a non-illness point but doesn't lead patients to higher optimal health levels that incorporate the six components of health. To illustrate how the health-illness continuum broadens health provisioners' perspective, two health components that significantly influence physical health, which many healthcare professionals greatly focus on, will be used. The two components are emotional health and social health.