9781422273876

students. But it is a real factor that many young people have to deal with. Rather than using the statistics as a way to place blame, the goal is to increase our understanding of the interconnection between education and health. As the CDC noted in its report on health and academics, “Leading national education organizations recognize the close relationship between health and education, as well as the need to foster health and well-being within the educational environment for all students.” Communities and Health An unsafe neighborhood clearly presents a problem for individual students, but it’s not just an individual problem, it’s also a community problem. Along those same lines, an influential medical journal, The Lancet , published an editorial in 2009 called “What Is Health? The Ability to Adapt.” The article urged readers to think beyond both disease-oriented and well-being–oriented definitions of health, and also consider health as it relates to communities. The authors also noted that human health can’t be separated from the health of the planet on which we live. “Human beings do not exist in a biological vacuum,” they wrote. “We live in an interdependent existence with the totality of the living world.” The authors had several things in mind here—one has to do with climate change, and the extent to which we can expect environmental problems to both increase and impact human health in the coming decades. They were also gesturing at the ways in which geopolitical circumstances can directly impact human

Teen Guides to Health & Wellness: School and Your Health

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