In the final installment of her seven-part series on Exercise as a Vital Sign (EVS), Kaiser Permanente physician Latifat Apatira blogs about how far we have come and the long road ahead toward reversing what she describes as “the epidemic of inactivity.”
She writes that health care providers have a duty to evaluate each patient’s physical activity habits. And that Kaiser Permanente is moving in the right direction through efforts to work closer with community partners on a wide range of initiatives aimed at promoting exercise and healthy living.
“To combat inactivity, we need programs like EVS,” Dr. Apatira writes. “But we also need changes in our policies, built environments, and culture to reframe the role physical activity plays in our lives every day.”
Physical activity, she writes, needs to be something that people do not only because it’s the healthy choice, “but because it’s the easy choice, the comfortable choice, or the fun choice.”
Read the blog in its entirety:
