Preparing Physically

College can be physically demanding. Students may be without parental supervision for the first time in their lives. They may exercise this new-found freedom to:

Study too hard
Work too hard
Get insufficient sleep
Eat an unbalanced diet
Play too hard
Ignore a potentially serious illness
Alcohol and Substance abuse

Unless your student is living at home, you probably won't be around to offer healthy advice. Here are some ways you can prepare your child for college:

Make sure your child knows his or her medical history. Make a written list that includes inoculations, hospitalizations, allergies, and diseases.
Have your student make a list of his or her existing medications and medication schedule. Get extra prescriptions and identify a pharmacy near the school for refills.
Make sure your student has health insurance. He or she should have an insurance card and understand when to use it. This insurance should be over and above what's covered by the student health service.
Encourage the student to visit the school's health facilities whenever he or she feels sick, physically or emotionally. Discuss the importance of preventative care and counseling services.
If your student has a chronic illness, find a specialist near the school before classes begin in case of an emergency.

The following are some simple, common sense ways you can help your student with medical care:

Send your student to college with a small medical kit that includes band-aids, gauze tape, thermometer, aspirin and/or ibuprofen, antacid, and anything else that specially applies to his or her medical needs.
Stress that if the student has a temperature of more than 101 degrees for more than a day, he or she needs to go to the health center.
Discuss the symptoms of the common cold and flu and how to treat them. Also specify when it's time to get help by visiting the student health center.
Pulling "all-nighters" and not getting enough sleep aren't helpful to good health or good grades. Stress that many illnesses in college are directly related to lack of sleep.
Stress can also lead to illness. Headaches are often a signal of too much stress.
Make sure that female students know how to do a breast self-examination and advise them to get a PAP smear once a year.
Make sure that male students know how to do a testicular self-examination.
Give your child the right information about nutrition so that he or she can avoid all the fad diets. Vitamins are a supplement to good nutrition, not a substitute.
Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) include AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhea, and hepatitis. Students who practice unsafe sex stand a good chance of contracting one (or more) of these diseases.

Adapted from a publication from the Minnesota Higher Education Services Office

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Preparing Physically