If Martinata, an extraterrestrial being from super outer-space, should stop by in Ghana to listen to our media content, s/he would swear at the awesome throne of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost that we are a bunch of belly-full lucky-go-lucky folks with no cares whatsoever in the world.
All we appear to care about is our Excellency Honourable political leaders, chief among them is the almighty Rawlings couple. Fact: raw Rawlings news over-powers the media landscape in unhealthy doses. Meanwhile, as a people, we have many issues to resolve.
A case in point! Take health as an example. Roll back to 30 years when I almost had my first baby on the floor because of shortage of beds at the Ridge Hospital. At the time, medical doctors at Korle Bu were on strike. When a baby is ready to arrive in the world, it pops out regardless of the mother’s location – be it a farm, toilet, bushes or a well-equipped hospital. What saved me from floor baby-birthing was the kindness of my family to send me to Kumordji Hospital where the bill amounted to my one year salary.
Fast forward to July, 2010 to news reports of the pressure on beds in our hospitals. On a recent visit to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, a whopping 30 years after my near floor-birthing experience, I saw women who had just had Caesarean surgery, lying on thin mattresses on the floor. The matter rests! No, this matter should not rest.
We must be upset enough to push for a change. In the face of our low-cost health-care delivery system, it’s even more important for individuals to take charge of their health and practice wellness.
Enters Professor Lade Wosornu, a columnist of The Ghanaian Times newspaper. He manifests in that paper every Saturday, on page six in “Health Issues.” Out of the estimated 220 original articles published in the column over five years, he has selected 25 on wellness theme for publication in a book entitled, “Welcome to wellness: A Ghanaian guide to personal well-being.”
I discovered his column about three years ago. It arrested me. I’ve gleaned so much medical wisdom from that column and I strongly recommend it to you as a key part of your weekend reading material. If you’ve never read that column, then you’ve missed a ton of health advice in the past five years. Ouch! But it’s not too late. Look for back issues. But that might be a bit cumbersome.
A short-cut solution is to buy the new book, “Welcome to wellness” and keep it by your bedside. Chew on it, one chapter at a time like you’ll handle a chewing stick to pick up not-so-nice left-over stuff from in-between your teeth after a good meal. As you recline, burping without shame after a heavy meal, read the book to welcome yourself to wellness.
You see, Professor Wosornu has been a medical doctor for 37 years in Ghana and beyond our shores. So clearly, he has seen all there is to see in health care – the good, the bad and the very ugly. He has seen patients of all sorts – the graveyard-dreaming terrified, the whatever-would-be-would-be I-don’t-care, the eye-popping clueless, and many others in between.
Lade Wosornu writes like a loving teacher who cares about his students. He knows so much and he teaches it gently. There is no such health column in Ghana so go to his river and swim in his wisdom. He makes complex health information very simple and readable, even funny. He wakes you up from slumber and/or any hallucination you may have about the state of your health. If after going through half of this book you don’t feel the urge to change anything about your lifestyle, then you need a serious visitation from God the Father, God the Son and definitely, God the Holy Ghost!
But Wosornu acknowledges the limits of advocacy. When it comes to behavioural change, awareness creation is only the beginning. The individual carries the burden of change. He, the medical doctor, advocate, columnist, author does his part through his writings. Take it or leave it.
But prepare yourself, for you’ll come away with an indictment after reading this book. Maybe you’ve not taken your annual leave in the past five years. You don’t exercise. You don’t have a hobby. All you do is work, work and work some more because you wait to rest in your grave. Or probably, you are the type who, even when your body demands it, won’t see a medical doctor for any sort of check up because fear has eaten away at your senses. You don’t laugh, enough. You drink alcohol, a lot.
May be, just maybe, you’re overweight – a politically correct way of saying that you’re FAT (taflatse ten times). Your stomach has protruded and hardened. People assure you that you look good, that your obesity is a sign of wellbeing. That’s an unholy lie.
Or, you may be one of those people who eat mighty balls of fufuu accompanied by thick and complex palm-nut soup made from an animal farm assortment of meat late in the evening after a hectic day’s work so that as you sleep, the food hugs and sleeps over you.
Who do you know, with an impressive stomach, a stomach that screams poor health which we glorify as good living? Such stomachs are taut, like leather pressed and pulled tight like the surface of a drum. If you’re a married man, people praise your wife for feeding you well. If you’re a woman, some people congratulate you for being pregnant.
According to Professor Wosornu, when you can’t bend with ease, if your thighs are not at peace with each other, then you must fix your weighty problem. I suggest that periodically, stand naked in front of a full-size mirror and look at yourself in your ‘birthday suit.’ If you like what you see even if you can’t see below your belly-button, worry. Or, like me, you might not like the strange bulges which make you look like a pear ripe for plucking. Let’s do something about it although that something, wellness, is tough to do.
So as Ghana stays enamoured with our political leaders and waste an incredibly hefty amount of time discussing the almighty Rawlings couple while our national agenda for health remains out of whack and might remain so for the unforeseeable future, let’s do what is within our power, to welcome ourselves to wellness. Professor Wosornu’s book can show you the way.
Unfortunately, no superb practice of wellness can save a pregnant woman with a breach who urgently needs a hospital bed to settle in after undergoing a Caesarean section to deliver a baby. Show me one individual who is the ‘government.’ I have a few questions to ask, chief among them is: When, if ever, would it be safe for all women of Ghana, irrespective of location or station in life, to have a baby without the gloomy reality of death hovering?
Oh, the book is selling for 30 Ghana cedis, the cost of a few meals. And, Martinata, our extraterrestrial being, would sanctify that expenditure.
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