Maintaining a healthy heart: Guidelines for a feasible goal

Good health, its achievement and maintenance, is a feasible goal within the health care system and the process of observing personal behavior and making therapeutic decisions based upon these observations may represent a crucial skill that the patient can generalize to other times and places, thus enabling long-term changes to be realized.

Abstract

Good health, its achievement and maintenance, is a feasible goal within our health care system. Behavioral technology has evolved to the point where a large array of techniques is available to help people adopt healthier ways of living. Application of practical techniques can produce initial changes in health behavior. Changes can be maintained through adaptive and continuous titrations of therapy. The continuing impact on health behavior of any particular technique may not be as influential in long-term change as the process of continually selecting and adapting many techniques to individual health problems as they occur over time. In practice, the practitioner and patient should continually monitor progress, identify modifiable problems, choose techniques to resolve the problems, and reevaluate treatment effectiveness against the record of past patient performance. The process of observing personal behavior and making therapeutic decisions based upon these observations may represent a crucial skill that the patient can generalize to other times and places, thus enabling long-term changes to be realized.