In honour of International Women’s Day Workforce Healthcare highlight’s the top 5 health concerns for women.

1. Heart Disease

Heart disease is one of the leading causes of mortality for both men and women. But more concerning than death is premature death. Heart disease is one of the leading causes of women ‘dying young’, chiefly due to the fact that it’s under-diagnosed. Chest pain is considered the main symptom of heart diseases but especially in women, heart disease can manifest in other ways like jaw pain, shoulder ache, nausea, vomiting or shortness of breath. Moderate exercise and a balanced diet will help to prevent heart disease and regular health checks are essential for early detection.
2. Breast Cancer
Some of the signs and symptoms of breast cancer include: change in size and shape of your breasts, a lump on your breasts, a change in skin texture like mottling or a rash, inverted nipple and persistent pain in your chest or armpit. You know your body best so don’t ignore the signs, it’s important that you let your doctor know as soon as you detect a change in your body to ensure early diagnosis.
3. Osteoporosis
According to the International Osteoporosis Foundation, because bone loss is gradual and painless, there are usually no symptoms to indicate a person is developing osteoporosis. This is why osteoporosis is often referred to as the silent disease. Often the first symptom of osteoporosis is a fracture. Most commonly, osteoporotic fractures occur at the spine, the wrist or the hip, although osteoporotic fractures can occur in other bones as well.
Take the IOF 1-minute online osteoporosis risk test
4. Depression
Depression is thought to affect more women than men. According to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (Sadag), common symptoms of depression include: persistent anxiety, feelings of hopelessness and negativity, insomnia, early morning waking or oversleeping, appetite loss or emotional eating, decreased energy/fatigue, persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment like headache, stomach and joint pain.
5. Autoimmune disorders
Autoimmune diseases are a group of disorders in which the immune system attacks the body and destroys or alters tissues. There are more than 80 serious chronic illnesses in this category, including lupus, multiple sclerosis and Type 1 diabetes.
It is not known what causes the body to turn on itself, but genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors are suspects. Symptoms are often hard to pinpoint but if you believe something may be amiss with your body, make multiple visits to the doctor or get second and third opinions if you have to.
Sources: WebMD; Breast Cancer Care.org; Sadag

 

World AIDS Day is held on 1 December each year and is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate people who have died from AIDs.

To honour the day here are 5 facts about HIV:

• HIV can be transmitted in a number of ways like unprotected sexual intercourse, transfusions of contaminated blood, sharing of contaminated injecting equipment and transmission between mother and baby during pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.

 

• There are several ways to prevent HIV like: practicing safe sex by using a condom and getting tested and treated for STDs like HIV. If you have HIV, start antiretroviral therapy as soon as possible for your own health and the health of your sexual partner or infant.

 

• 36.7 million people are living with HIV worldwide. 1.8 million of these are children.

 

• HIV testing can help to ensure that people living with HIV get access to antiretroviral treatment. An estimated 40% of people with HIV remain undiagnosed and don’t know their infection status.

 

• HIV is the greatest risk factor for developing TB. In 2015, an estimated 1.2 million of the 10.4 million people who developed TB worldwide were HIV positive. In the same year approximately 390 000 deaths from tuberculosis occurred among people living with HIV.

 
Dr Richard Malkin, MD of Workforce Healthcare says that he cannot emphasise enough how serious HIV is in South Africa. “500 000 people die every year from AIDs and most of these people don’t know their status.”

This large amount of deaths can be avoided by accessing free treatment at state clinics. Once on treatment people can lead normal healthy lives.
“As a medical practitioner, looking after thousands of people in the workplaces around South Africa, where we’ve been dealing with HIV for over three decades, my conscience does not allow me to accept that over 500 000 people are dying,” Malkin says. “We need to re-look at how HIV is being dealt with in our country as I believe that this is not acceptable.”
 

Source: World Health Organisation

 
 
 
 
 

16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children is a global campaign to raise awareness, which runs  from 25 November to 10 December. This period includes Universal Children’s Day and World Aids Day.
South Africa’s theme this year is: “Count me in: together moving a non-violent South Africa forward”.
In the spirit of standing together towards a non-violent South Africa, here are some places of safety where you can seek help if you are in an abusive situation.
People Opposed to Woman Abuse, or Powa
Powa provides counselling, both telephonically and in person, temporary shelter for and legal help to women who have experienced violence.
Stop Gender Abuse
Run by LifeLine Southern Africa, Stop Gender Abuse offers crisis counselling for women who have been raped or abused. It also gives advice and support to people who wish to help women who are in need of help, and gives legal and other options available.
Childline South Africa
This non-profit organisation helps abused children and their families. It deals with issues such as physical and sexual abuse, substance abuse, behavioural problems and trafficking, and gives legal advice.
Child Welfare South Africa
Child Welfare South Africa focuses on child protection, child care and family development. Neglect and child abuse can also be reported.
In addition to these places of safety, Workforce Healthcare’s EAP call-centre is manned by qualified counselors who will find victims of abuse the help they need. Workforce Healthcare also runs onsite workshops to address the effects of abuse, bullying and violence.
Read more at Southafrica.info
 
 

1. Progressive muscle relaxation
The problem with stress is that it can cause you to tense certain muscles in your body without even realising it. Over time you become used to the tension and stop noticing that your muscles are tight. Sore muscles, especially in the neck and shoulders can stem from chronic tension. Try progressive muscle relaxation by focusing on slowly tensing and then relaxing your muscles, one group at a time. Start with your toes and work your way up to your neck. Doing progressive muscle relaxation regularly will increase your awareness of when you’re tensing your muscles and you will learn to let go of tension.
2. Visualisation
Sometimes it can all become too much and while you can’t physically go to your happy place, a quick mental holiday will do just fine. Think of a few scenes that represent total relaxation for you – the mountain cabin you once stayed in, the local park on a Saturday afternoon, the beach paradise you’d love to visit one day or even the comfortable sofa you like to sit on while you read. Close your eyes and spend a few minutes imagining you are there. Engage as many senses as you can by thinking about what you’d see, hear, smell, touch or taste if you were really there.
3. Deep Breathing
Breathing is an involuntary action, so we don’t pay much attention to how we breathe. However, becoming more aware of how you breathe by doing a few deep breathing exercises can produce a natural relaxation response. Deep breathing increases the supply of oxygen to your brain and helps promote a state of calmness. Breathing techniques also assist you in focusing on your body, which can, in turn, quiet your mind.
4. Engage your senses
Engaging your senses can help you to refocus your attention and help you let go of worry. The key is to find out which sense is most helpful for you to engage with. Some people find that listening to music calms their minds, others find that looking at family photos can help to relieve their stress. Experiment with different activities that engage your senses to find out which senses work for you. It could be rubbing scented hand lotion on your hands, giving yourself a quick neck rub, eating something tasty or squeezing a stress ball.
5. Laugh!
Have you heard the saying – ‘laughter is the best medicine?’ Well, it’s actually true! Laughing stimulates circulation and soothes tension which relieves some of the physical symptoms of stress. Laughter also increases endorphins released by the brain and produces a relaxed feeling. So, to beat the stress read funny stories or look at funny memes on your phone, talk to a co-worker who you know has a good sense of humour or think about a hilarious anecdote. A willingness to laugh at yourself can also serve as a good reminder not to take life so seriously, which can do wonders for your stress level.

South Africa celebrates National Nutrition Week from 9 to 15 October and this year’s theme is ‘Love your beans’, highlighting the importance of pulses like lentils, beans, soya and peas in our diets.

Lynn Moeng-Mahlangu, Cluster Manager of Health Promotion, Nutrition and Oral Health at the National Department of Health says, “There’s a good reason to put dry beans, peas, lentils and soya into the spotlight. Unfortunately, they are largely overlooked as they are often seen as a ‘poor man’s food’ and they can take a long time to cook. We should be eating them, along with a variety of foods, at least four times a week; and yet, many of us hardly include them in our diets.”

Association for Dietetics in South Africa (ADSA) president, Maryke Gallagher says, “We are delighted that this year’s theme highlights these affordable, versatile and tasty foods that make such a vital contribution to our health when they are a regular part of the family’s healthy eating regime.”
The top nutritional benefits of eating dry beans, peas, lentils and soya are that:

• They are low in fat but high in fibre and have a low glycaemic index
• They are naturally cholesterol-free
• They are naturally gluten-free
• They are a good source of plant protein, providing twice as much protein as wheat
• They are good sources of vitamins such as folate and minerals such as potassium and calcium

Here are a few recipes for introducing more pulses into your diet:
Sweet potato and lentil curry
Bean soup
Samp and beans with soya mince
 
Source: National Nutrition Week
 
 
 

Today is #WorldSmileDay.
We celebrate this day on the first Friday of October to commemorate artist, Harvey Ball creating the iconic smiley face symbol in 1963. However the purpose of this day is also to show the importance of smiling and how important it is to give back in order to put a smile on someone’s face.
Flashing a smile is an outward exhibition of a positive attitude but did you know there can be health benefits to smiling?
Here are five reasons to smile everyday:
1. Smiling can improve your mood.
Emotions may originate in the brain but your facial muscles have the ability to either reinforce or transform those feelings. Studies show that by enhancing positive emotions or suppressing negative ones with facial expressions, a person’s mood begins to align more strongly with the emotion their face is communicating.
2. Smiling can help to reduce stress.
A 2012 study, studied 170 participants who were told to hold chopsticks in their mouths in three formations, making them smile to various degrees without realising it, after performing a stressful task. The experiment revealed that subjects who smiled the widest with the chopsticks experienced a substantial reduction in heart rate and fast stress recovery compared to those whose expressions remained neutral.
3. Smiling makes you more approachable.
A 2004 study found that smiles shared by employees in the service industry influenced their impressions on customers in a positive way. Smiling employees came across as more likable and friendly and customers left feeling more satisfied with the experience. An added display of an authentic smile also helped workers to appear to be more competent.
4. Smiles are contagious…in a good way.
We all possess something called mirror neurons, cells in the pre-motor cortex and inferior parietal cortex that are activated when we perform a given action as well as when we witness someone else performing it. When it comes to smiling, mirror neurons respond to the acts of seeing and doing.
5. Smiles may strengthen the body on a cellular level.
Just as smiling helps the body to get rid of stress, smiling can release tension on a cellular level as well. Cells can apparently distinguish between safety and danger, find and repair problems and create an overall sense of balance within the body. A person’s thoughts have a direct effect on cell function. When we smile, we reduce the rigidness of our cells and this physical relaxation can help combat the risk of stress-induced cell mutations that can lead to the development or persistence of cancers.
Source: The Huffington Post

If you go by the principle that your body is your temple, this should also extend to steering away from fad diets. Trying un-tested diets could leave you with long-term health concerns like, a slower metabolism, high cholesterol, hypertension and could also increase your risk of heart disease and stroke. Yet there are also popular diets that have been around for years which could also lead to health problems. Before you try a particular diet you should know all the facts first, in order to make an informed decision.
1. Raw Food Diet:
The theory behind the Raw Food Diet is that cooking destroys the vitamins, enzymes and nutrients in foods. According to the Huffington Post, while this is certainly true for some foods, other foods, like tomatoes actually increase in nutrients once they are cooked. This diet is also very difficult to follow properly. It could lead to malnutrition from lack of nutrient-rich foods if not followed correctly.

2. High Fat Diet:
Popular diets like Banting and the Ketogenic Diet advocate for little or no carbohydrates or sugars, adequate proteins and high fats. According to Livestrong, If taken to the extreme, a high-fat diet can result in ketosis, a process in which fats are broken down for energy in the absence of glucose from carbohydrates. Ketosis is a catabolic condition which quickly wastes muscle, slowing your metabolism. A slow metabolism makes it harder to lose weight, undermining your fat loss efforts. However, the most serious concern of high fat diets is the risk of heart disease. According to the American Heart Association, a diet high in saturated fat can dramatically raise your cholesterol, increasing your risk of heart disease.
3. Low Fat Diet:
This may seem contrary to the above, however the thinking behind a low fat diet comes from 90’s trends in nutrition that stated that people should try to eat as little fats as possible, as fat is high in calories. This was interpreted as meaning, as long as you eat very little fats you could make up for it by eating more carbohydrates. This gave rise to an industry of low fat muffins, low fat yoghurts, low fat bagels and fat free milk. Yet according to BBC Good Food, to meet the need for low fat products manufacturers quickly got rid of all traces of animal fats, which were deemed high fat, in food items replacing it with hydrogenated vegetable oil. We now know that these hydrogenated fats increase levels of dangerous trans-fats which are both bad for the heart and our cholesterol. Manufacturers also found they had to increase the amount of sugar in their low fat products so that we continued to enjoy their taste and texture. All of this meant that the typical low fat product tended to be high in carbohydrates, might contain trans-fats and ultimately had a very similar calorie count to the original product.
Dr Richard Malkin, Managing Director of Workforce Healthcare, says there are so many different diets and eating plans for the simple reason that people are different.

“There are probably five different types of morphologies or types of people who respond to a specific type of diet,” he says. “It would be a major breakthrough if there was a marker that identified a person as to the type of diet that suited them. Then a simple test would classify a person as being best suited to a specific type of diet, for example high fat, high carbs, vegetarian etc.”

However, Dr Malkin believes that the biggest contributor to being overweight is a disorganised day.
“If a person got up early enough to eat a proper breakfast, have time to pack a healthy lunch and then eat a light dinner and do 30 minutes of exercise three times a week, they would be leading a healthy life but the pressure of life affects a person’s ability to manage their time well and people miss meals, have massive hunger urges, snack on foods that are high in carbohydrates, get addicted to carbohydrates and for these reasons they put on weight,” he explains.
“Trying to lead an organised life, as far as possible, is the biggest factor in leading a healthy life and preventing most causes of diseases,” Dr Malkin says.

For Women’s Month we celebrate amazing women that are changing the world in positive ways. However, we also need to give thought to the struggles faced by many women in both the home and work life.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), one in three women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence. WHO has found that being victims of physical violence can lead to both short-term as well as long-term health concerns for women. Not only can violence against women lead to injuries but it can have fatal results like homicide or suicide.
Physical and sexual violence can lead to unintended pregnancies, induced abortions, miscarriage, stillbirth, gynaecological problems and sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV.
Women who have been victims of violence are at high risk of becoming depressed and developing post-traumatic stress disorder. WHO found that these women had generally poor health but also frequently experienced illnesses like headaches, back pain, abdominal pain, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorders and limited mobility.
Women can also experience forms of abuse, like bullying, in the workplace. According to  Psychology Today, 34 % of women have reported falling victim to workplace bullying. Women who have experienced bullying in the workplace are at great risk of developing anxiety and depression.
This women’s month, Workforce Healthcare, a specialist health and wellness company whose expertise lie in bringing primary and occupational healthcare directly to the workplace, are trying to address the health problems caused by women abuse by providing support for women in the workplace.
Workforce Healthcare analysed their call centre trends and found that family relationship problems continue to be one of the biggest issues faced by women in the workplace. In July 2016, 21% of all calls placed to the Workforce Healthcare call centre were about family relationship problems.
These problems included domestic violence, emotional and physical abuse, marital problems, divorce, reproductive health as well as children’s behavioural problems.
Workforce Healthcare found that many of the women who faced these problems were often reluctant to seek therapy, mainly because of the myths and misconceptions regarding therapy. Workforce Healthcare runs an Employee Assistance Programme in order to help workers deal with their various concerns, however they have identified that the first step in addressing issues as sensitive as women abuse, is to start with simply talking to female employees about topics that have historically not been talked about.
Dr Richard Malkin, Managing Director of Workforce Healthcare, says that according to a study released by Statistics South Africa in 2015, most households are run by single mothers.
Yet the numbers revealed that 31% of mothers were recorded as being married, meaning that the husband and father of the household was possibly absent from the household and their children’s lives. Furthermore, over 1.1 million births were registered in South Africa in 2015 but 64% of those had no information on the fathers.

“South Africa will never change its attitude to women if we continue to have single parent families, the cycle of abuse will just continue,” Malkin says.

This month, Workforce Healthcare offered clients the option of a ‘Ladies Talk’ Workshop. The workshop aims to help female employees understand the nature of various family relationship problems, equip employees with emotional and legal strategies in dealing with divorce and separation, empower employees with a better understanding of their rights, help employees understand their rights with regards to domestic violence and to explain the function of their 24-hour call centre and how to access it.
By offering discussion around these topics which are often not talked about Workforce Healthcare is hoping to empower female employees, as well as help to improve their morale and job performance.

To work in the construction industry one has to be logical, dedicated and have the ability to travel and be away from home frequently. But most of all one needs to be in excellent health to handle the demands of a very physical career.
Dr Richard Malkin, MD of Workforce Healthcare, a specialist health and wellness company that brings health testing, primary and occupational healthcare directly to the workplace, singled out some of the main health concerns people who work in the construction industry should be aware of:

1. Injuries on the job.

These range from falling from great heights, collapse of excavations and being hit by heavy machinery, thereby twisting of a joint. Dr Malkin explains that construction is a very physically demanding career in which one needs to have good reflexes to prevent injury. However, if injury on the job occurs, it could lead to long-term injury, like chronic back pain, which needs to be managed appropriately. For this, Dr Malkin advises medical examinations that are risk based and job specific ensuring the engineer is fit to work under defined conditions which will reduce risk of getting injured

2. Exposure to dust on building sites.

Exposure to excessive dust at building sites can lead to long-term respiratory conditions. Dr Malkin advises that annual medical exams in which a lung function test and a chest X-ray is performed is a necessity for those who work at construction sites. An annual check-up will also include risk-based assessments which factor in height and weight, urine test, drug tests, a physical exam, psychometric testing and a hearing test.

3. Lifestyle diseases

Lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and hypertension are a concern in all workplaces, however considering the stress and physical nature of construction as a career, those who work in the construction industry could be at great risk of developing these types of illnesses. Dr Malkin explains that diabetes and high blood pressure can greatly affect an individual’s fitness levels, which is dangerous for civil engineers as they need to have good physical fitness as a requirement of the job. “It’s important to have regular check-ups so that these lifestyle diseases can be identified, managed with medication and monitored,” Dr Malkin says.

4. Depression and substance abuse

One of the demands of construction as a career is the ability to be away from home often while visiting building sites and other projects. This could lead to loneliness and feelings of depression. Construction is also a physically demanding career that can be very stressful. Dr Malkin says that anyone and everyone can be affected by substance abuse but added stress, peer pressure and depression can increase an individual’s risk of abusing alcohol or drugs. Dr Malkin advises that workplace awareness programmes can help to educate people in the construction industry as to the dangers of substance abuse, especially in a career that requires an individual to be completely sober and have good reflexes while on the job. However, he says that access to counsellors via 24-hour call centres, such as Workforce Healthcare’s, can provide a very important support system for those struggling with depression and substance abuse.