Interpersonal Communication Parks

Personal Relationships and Health by Malcolm Parks

As a member of the healthcare community, I was intrigued by the title of this article. The section heading grabbed my attention as I know that many factors can affect our personal health, but I had not truly considered how interpersonal communication; interaction between two people, usually face to face (Adler and Proctor 13); correlated to a person’s physical health. In an effort to show the important relationship between the quality of your communication and the quality of your life, Parks reviewed extensive research that strongly connects interpersonal communication with five aspects of mental and physical health. (Parks 41-42)

Parks talks about the value of learning and practicing social

Blood pressure changes in reaction to stress. Studies reveal that cardiovascular disease is both more common and more likely to be fatal among people who experience high level of family conflict (Parks 45). The doctor’s office can be a scary place. People receive bad news, they are told to change their diet or that they need to take new medicines. The doctor’s office can cause anxiety and stress, that in turn causes a person’s blood pressure to rise. This happens so often that there are protocols in place to take blood pressure twice during an office visit. This gives the patient an opportunity to relax. People with high blood pressure are counselled to take their blood pressure at home and report it back to the doctor as well. This helps the physician get a more accurate depiction of what the cardiovascular condition is like outside of the

People with unsupportive family and friends are less successful when it comes to smoking cessation, taking medications, maintaining health conditions and losing weight (Parks 46). Death from drug and alcohol abuse is more common among people with disordered personal relationships and disordered relationship are both the product and the cause of drug and alcohol abuse. (Parks 47). There was a patient in the clinic that talked to me about their struggles with sobriety. Due to their addiction, they had lost all of their family and friends. When things were tough, they did not have anyone to turn to for support and was constantly falling back into old habits. They wanted to get sober, but did not know how to do it. We were able to get the patient into a rehab program that was able to provide them with support to overcome their addiction. They would not have been able to do it without the interpersonal relationship that was offered to them by the rehab