The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership. 

Maybe things have changed in the 40 years since I last roamed the halls of Port Clinton High School, or perhaps your experience was different, but for my money health class was the most ridiculous waste of time of my entire academic career. And I actually had health twice, once as a freshman, which fulfilled my required semester, then again as a senior because … well, why not. 

The frosh iteration was particularly pointless. The teacher, and I use that term loosely, was also our football coach, Jim Hastings. Coach Hastings spent just two years at PCHS, compiling a 16-4 overall record with the Redskins and parlaying that success into a position on the coaching staff at Arkansas State.

One might generously describe his instructional style as “hands off.” Health was a pass/fail class at PCHS and we never had an assignment, a test or a quiz. Classes consisted of us watching whatever movie coach could put his hands on, whether it had anything to do with health or not. We once watched “Enrico Fermi: Father of the Atomic Bomb,” and another time an episode of “Austin City Limits” featuring Jackson Browne. To his minor credit, he did once show a film featuring an astoundingly large and unattractive woman giving birth, which I’m certain caused teen celibacy rates to spike for several months.

My health class experience as a senior was marginally better. The teacher was Ida Bacso, the cheerleading coach, and she at least gave it her best try. We had a textbook and assigned reading verified by an occasional quiz. The content, though, was a weird combination of grooming tips and obscure cautionary tales which came out sounding something like “brush up and down and avoid the Triangle of Death.” I recall a picture in the textbook of a skull with a triangle superimposed over it, the Triangle of Death, where an infection from a popped pimple could spread to the brain and kill you. Yeah, classmates were dropping left and right from that, let me tell you.

What I’m getting at here is that high school health classes, at least in my day, were largely a wasted opportunity. We fret about healthcare and insurance and the lack of doctors in rural areas, but we did very little back then to create an informed, health-conscious and self-reliant populace.

The over-the-counter medicine aisle at any Walgreens or CVS contains drugs that would have seemed miraculous to the doctors of 100, even 50, years ago, yet we are largely left to our own devices when it comes to figuring out how and when to use them. I wish that instead of watching movies about atomic bombs or learning about arcane regions of the body that infect the brain, I had learned more basic medicine: how to diagnose common maladies like colds and the flu and how to use o-t-c drugs to treat them; when a bump on the head is no big deal and when it’s life threatening; when a butterfly bandage will do just fine and when stitches are required. When I look back at my trips to the doctor, and especially the emergency room, over the years, I would suggest that half of them were completely unnecessary had I or someone in my household had basic medical training.

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when we absolutely need doctors and hospitals and professional medical care, but I can’t help but think that there are times when our cumulative lack of knowledge about health and wellness creates an unnecessary and unsustainable burden on our health care system. 

What do you think? Is health and wellness more of a priority in our schools today than it was in my day? Could a more holistic approach to teaching basic medicine help alleviate the healthcare crisis?