In the interest of full disclosure, the blog post I am going to site for this piece was written by my father, Thomas L. Creer, PhD. He runs the blog called Manage Your Illness, which is a resource for people with chronic illness of all kinds. My father has spent his entire career as a clinical psychologist working with patients to manage their health.

In his post Self-management and heart failure, he discusses the results of a study about self-management of heart disease and hospital admissions. Patients who take responsibility for their own health, who implement preventions, and who are compliant with their heart medications have fewer hospitalizations due to their heart problems, and health care costs in general are greatly reduced.

All too often, we tend to expect our health care to be provided by our physicians, with little or no participation on our part. However, there is a movement afoot in the States to make patients co-equal partners with their physicians in the management of their health, and disease. Something as simple as maintaining a medication regime can make a great amount of difference in improving overall health.