Stay Healthy on the Job This Cold & Flu Season
To stay healthy throughout our lives, our immune systems need proper training and the right support.
- By Isaac Eliaz
- Nov 01, 2011
As an integrative physician, I often have patients ask me what they can do to treat seasonal illness with safe and effective natural therapies. Whether you're talking about a common cold or the more serious flu virus, it's easy to consider these ordinary ailments to be an inevitable part of the "cold and flu" season. Colds are the most prevalent infectious illness in the United States, but they usually don't present dangerous symptoms unless one has a weakened immune system. The flu, on the other hand, can be a much more serious illness since it is a highly contagious respiratory infection caused by a wide variety of influenza viruses. It even can lead to death in rare cases among immune-compromised individuals.
Fortunately, there are both short-term and long-term steps you can take to strengthen and improve your body's immune defenses safely and naturally. With a strong and well-trained immune system, you can effectively lessen the damage that both types of illnesses can cause to your body. In fact, the right health-promoting actions can prevent the common cold or flu from occurring altogether -- a critical benefit for the busy working person or multi-tasking parent who believes he or she simply can't afford to get sick. In addition to building immunity, these recommendations support your overall health and vitality so you can enjoy more energy and productivity throughout the year, without being held back by seasonal ailments.
Short-Term and Long-Term Prevention Strategies
Cold and flu infections can exert lasting negative impacts on your health, especially if you don't take the time to rest and recover completely, which is a common pitfall for those of us who lead busy lives. To avoid getting sick in the first place, the best approach is to give both short-term and long-term support to your immune system with natural immune enhancers and healthy lifestyle choices.
While long-term strategies enhance overall immune function and general health by strengthening and training the immune system to function better over time, short-term strategies are beneficial during acute risk and exposure when you need extra protection and support. By following a balanced approach to immune and overall health, which takes into account short- and long-term strategies, you can strengthen immunity, steer clear of seasonal illnesses, and recover much faster if you do happen to get sick.
Lifestyle Choices for Long-Term Immune Health
To stay healthy throughout our lives, our immune systems need proper training and the right support. There are numerous contributing factors that are known to weaken immunity. Stress, exhaustion, inflammation, sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, dehydration, exposure to toxins, improper training due to over-vaccination, and other influences can all have significant negative impacts on the immune system’s ability to identify and destroy harmful invaders. So in order to stay healthy, it is critical that we make diet, lifestyle, and supplement choices that will protect, strengthen, and help train the immune system to function at its best. The following recommendations for long-term immune health will help to build and strengthen immune and overall health over time to keep you from getting sick later on.
This article originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.