Stop blaming your doctor
In giant bold letters the shirt I designed said “Ask your doctor if getting off you’re a** is right for you” This throwback shirt, super popular when printed a decade ago, was meant to offend. I am ok with that in the original way people would be offended because it made a statement. A statement about taking control of your health. Essentially the shirt is telling you to stop asking about that pill you saw on TV and start putting in the work to stay healthy.
This though is 2020 so naturally nothing is as what it once was. Apparently to some the shirt means something else. A friend saw the design and said they loved the shirt because it attacked the medical establishment. It was somehow Doctors who are at fault for the lack of exercise in the world. Huh?
Stop blaming your doctor. Your preventative health is your responsibility and yours alone. My online bio includes a story from a sociology professor Michael Radelet. It’s included partly to make me sound smart but partly because it really is a great analogy for a lot of things. In the story he describes the difference between his field and psychology. Psychologists he said were like lifeguards jumping into a river trying to pull out people who were drowning. Sociology on the other hand was concerned with preventing people from falling into the river in the first place.
That’s the way I view the health world. Doctors are there to pull you out when you are drowning. Don’t get me wrong a lot of them, especially those in specialties that treat chronic disease, would love to stop you from falling or jumping in the river of pathology and many try.
Try as they might they are simply not ideally positioned to do a whole lot. So much of our health depends on what we do every single day. What you eat, how you sleep, the amount of exercise you get are all things that are a result of daily decisions. Your doctor sees you for a short period on a very occasional basis unless you are already in a very advanced state of disease. There is zero chance you can alter daily behavior in a meaningful way seeing someone once a month let alone once or twice a year.
The docs try though. They encourage people to take better care of themselves but people don’t want diet advice from a doctor(or really anyone) . They don’t want to be told to sleep more. Patients will politely sit pretending to listen as though the doc was a waiter giving you dinner specials and then go with their usual, a pill. They want an easy quick fix.
At least they think they want a quick fix but it turns out even that isn’t always easy. Some studies show more than half people don’t take the pills they are prescribed to treat their chronic condition. I would say this raises the question if patients won’t follow something that is painless like swallowing a pill how much success do you think a doctor will have convincing someone to do something hard like put down the soda. I would say it raises that question but in truth it doesn’t raise the question, it answers it.
The real truth is over 40% of our daily decisions are habits. I would be willing to be that even a higher percentage of the decisions that affect our health are guided by the subconscious. In order to change our health, we then have to change habits. This is something that cannot possibly be done with infrequent office visits.
This is a big part of why the Human Movement Project exists. If we are going to truly attack chronic disease from a preventative perspective we need a different model. We need to see you each multiple days a week. This almost daily contact let’s us help change diet, sleep and exercise habits more effectively than a doctor who only has that opportunity occasionally.
This is a place to work out and have fun but its also a place to change our mindset and replace bad habits with good. We can help but only help though. We cannot do it for you. The buck stops with you. You have to pay attention to the advice and put the effort forward to really make the change. Whine all you want about having to go to the doctor but a lot of those visits are on you. You made the decisions that harmed your health and you made those decisions daily.
If you want to get better you need to change those habits. This series coming up will be all about the science of habits and how you can use that science to change things.