Why Study Health Sciences
If you are looking for a rewarding career in which you can help people, consider studying the health sciences. It’s a fairly broad field of study with many sub-disciplines aimed towards improving health, efficiency, and access to healthcare. Students in the health sciences can also later pursue careers in public health and policy, medicine, nursing, or social work. Of increasing importance as the world becomes more interconnected is the field of global health. Here are a few things you could be studying in health sciences.
Like to work with people one-on-one? You might consider sub-disciplines that promote healthy lifestyles, such as nutrition or sports medicine where you can work with individuals and promote better health through diet and exercise. Sports medicine focuses on physical fitness and prevention of injuries, and practitioners can help both professional athletes and normal exercisers. More recently, sports medicine practitioners have become more important in educating the public about the importance of physical activity in an age where many people are largely sedentary. Through these sub-disciplines, one can positively impact the lives of people by working with them directly.
Another important sub-discipline of the health sciences is prevention and public health. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In this case, you would be examining primary prevention measures to promote health and spread awareness on how people can live longer, healthier, and more productive lives. This could include researching rising obesity rates, increase in diabetes, infectious diseases like swine flu, or even bioterrorism.
Infectious disease is another division open to students who are interested in studying pathogens and parasites. Epidemiologists examine spread of a disease in order to inform policy on how to deal with disease outbreaks or prevent them. According to the World Health Organization, the top three infectious diseases are HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. A growing area of research is emerging diseases--either zoonoses (pathogens that normally infect animals jumping to humans like SARs) or increased spread of vector-borne diseases, like West Nile virus carried by mosquitoes.
If you are more interested in policy, then you can study the intersection between healthcare and government policy. You might investigate questions of access to healthcare, the impact of a population’s health on the economy, or how to optimize a healthcare system. Moreover, dips and rises in the global economy can influence a country’s health expenditures. Some have posited that healthcare could be a remedy for the global economic woes, particularly when it comes to economic growth fueled by the pharmaceutical industry in emerging economies.
At the international level, there are many health problems which can be examined in a global context. You could study the impact of climate change on health or interventions at the global scale. Delivery of healthcare services is a very big issue in both developed and developing economies, for differing reasons. Also an issue of interest in the international arena is the growing trend of medical tourism - people traveling across borders for medical care that is either unavailable or simply cost prohibitive in their home countries. Accreditation, quality, and legal oversight of these facilities can vary greatly around the world so some procedures undertaken by medical tourists could be very risky.
The disciplines mentioned above are but a few of the many that comprise the health sciences. Once you have completed a health sciences degree, there are many different opportunities that you will be presented with after graduation: analysis and research on public health or jobs in health policy, social work, nursing, or medical school. There are many options open to you once you have built a strong foundation in health sciences at the bachelor level and your future success will be stamped with a clean bill of health.
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