10 Reasons To Think Twice Before Going To The Doctor (Advice From An MD)

[barbara]

BY DR. AMY SHAH
MAY 2, 2014

Here's the cold, hard truth about your doctor: he or she is not going to be your "personal health fairy," nor will he or she will guide you to your optimal body.

It's not their fault. Doctors don't have the time or expertise to get you into tip-top shape; their job is to fix you when you fall. You don't rely on the auto mechanic to tell you how to optimize your car, do you? So why would you wait for a doctor to tell you how to optimize you?

Plus, on average, you'll likely take two hours off of work for a doctor’s appointment. Multiply those hours by the average wage and total number of annual checkups in a year, these appointments could theoretically cost the US economy almost $2 billion in lost productivity alone.

So, inspired by James Altucher's book Choose Yourself, I say choose yourself as CEO of your own body.

To all my super-intelligent physician colleagues who will send me hate mail after reading what i've written above, let me explain. Below are 10 good reasons why we should all choose ourselves to be CEO of our own body.

1. Your diet, not medicine, is the key to your health.

Here's the unfortunate truth: people in healthcare don't know sh*t when it comes to food and nutrition. This is why nutrition websites and alternative medicine practices thrive. Drug companies want us to think that we need their products to be healthy, but the reality is that if we change our diets enough, we probably won't need their drugs anymore.

So why doesn't everyone know this? The problem is that the information on diet is really variable … Paleo, vegan gluten-free, etc. It's actually very simple: pick whichever diet makes you feel your best after a month and go with it. There is no one perfect diet, but there may be a perfect diet for YOU, so try them all. As long it involves real, whole foods, and DOESN'T involve miracle pills or miracle equipment, you're good.

2. Hospitals are dangerous places.

Don't go to a hospital unless you absolutely have to. Seriously! Did you know that medical errors in hospitals account for three times more deaths than car accidents? — 100,000 deaths a year compared to 34,000. Or consider this horrifying stat: 1 out of every 370 people admitted to a hospital dies due to medical errors. And if you happen to a patient in the ICU, you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting an infection you didn't have when you came in. You can read about this and other fun hospital facts in this shocking piece.

3. Yearly physicals are a waste of time and money.

You don't need yearly physicals. Nor do you need to see the doctor for colds, or a stomach flu, or a fever that lasts less than one week. Besides cancer screenings, there's really nothing you'll get out of your yearly physical that you can't do yourself. Save yourself some money and time and take care of your body yourself. If you're exercising with sprints, eating a healthy diet low in sugar, and generally feeling good, then checking in with the doctor every few years is quite adequate.

4. Doctors still don't know enough about the gut. And that can be dangerous.

The intestinal tract is like the outer space of medicine. It's like a big black hole and the medical profession knows very little about what's in there. There's an immune system in there, and a nervous system ... god only knows what else we'll discover.

You may have heard that leaky gut can lead to autoimmune disease, and that leaky gut may play a role in diabetes. I am convinced that you can influence much of your health and well-being by fixing your gut flora.

How to fix your gut flora? For starters, avoid antibiotics. They kill your good bacteria. You should think of antibiotics as a killer: they kill the bad bacteria but they really annihilate the good bacteria, too. To help your gut, consume fermented foods, naturally occurring probiotics, and stay away from antibiotics, any foods that trigger your sensitivities and chemicals added to your foods. What can a doctor do to heal your gut? Essentially, nothing.

5. If you really want to reverse disease, you should take a chill pill.

Most of the problems we deal with today (diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia) stem from inflammation. How do you calm inflammation? Start by reducing stress hormones such as cortisol. How do you calm those cortisol and the other stress hormones? Learn how to relax. Though harder than it sounds, you can do this yourself, without expensive blood tests or visits to the doctor. Yoga and meditation are great, but if they're not for you, here are 7 other simple steps you can take to lower your stress levels.

6. Many problems get solved when you get off the sugar train.

We are all prisoners to sugar — as you know, it's as addictive as drugs. If there's any food that you find yourself wanting to eat when you're already full, that's not a good food to have in your life. And for most people, those crave-worthy foods involve sugar, which is also the main culprit in inflammation. (See #5, above.) So start the slow wean today. First, take a week to get off sodas and sweetened drinks. Next week, eliminate processed foods with sugar. Lastly, stop using sugar substitutes. There you have it! I just saved you a whole lot of money on a sugar detox.

7. Remember: Only you can make yourself move.

No one can do this for you. You must move. A lot. Any daily movement is great. Walking 10,000 steps is great. But if want to bring it up a notch to optimize? Add little 30 second sprints to any exercise outing. Here's a rule of thumb about how fast sprints should feel: make sure you break into a sweat and the thought of doing it more than 30 seconds makes you want to die.

8. No doctor can teach you how to thrive.

Anyone who's heard of Arianna Huffington knows about her new book, Thrive. She talks about how sleeping, meditating, and just generally taking care of yourself is the key to thriving (not just living). As she says in her book: success in life is more than money or power, it should be about well-being, wisdom and wonder.

9. No one will tell you that an essential piece of health is finding a passion.

Pursuing a passion and finding purpose in your life will help your body in ways you never imagined. Did you know that people with a strong sense of purpose live longer? I explain more details about how and why you need to find a passion project here.

10. The doctor is VERY expensive.

No matter what happens with the Affordable Care Act, we need to realize that you spend, on average, about $8,000 a year on healthcare. The solution? Use your doctor as a consultant. For example, you don't go to a lawyer unless you're in trouble or you just can't figure it out yourself. Your doctor is there for guidance when your train gets off track. Instead of reflexively going to the doctor, invest that money into yourself and your health.

So there it is. I hope you are convinced to take on the title of CEO of You. Or maybe, now you just hate doctors. Sigh. I'm OK with the fact that I will lose money for revealing this. You deserve to know the truth.

 

[richatdcro]

Unfortunately most employers/educators/job network agencies/ centrelink require medical certificates for colds and stomach flu.

 

[Jeannine]

With electronic records EVERYTHING you tell a doctor and every test result is now available to any future doctor you visit. There is no privacy anymore.

 

[bob-a-rama]

I'm pretty much in agreement with that.

Especially the diet part. I went no sugar, low-glycemic in 2000, and a couple of years ago I added avoidance of high arachadonic acid foods.

Added a little home PEMFT therapy and:

Arthritis is gone, bursitis is gone, plantar fasciitis gone, and an extensive blood test shows all my numbers in the recommended zone.

Where I disagree is that I think a yearly blood test is a worthy reason to visit the doctor. If one of the markers is out of whack, you can do some research, adjust your diet accordingly, and perhaps prevent a problem. It's like checking the oil and the belts in your car every 5,000 miles or so.

The trick is to get a doctor who will prescribe the blood test and not drug you for a problem unless you have exhausted all other means (or go to lef.org - note: I have no connection with them other than being a customer).

It's the ounce of prevention, the stitch in time or whatever proverb you like.

Bob

 

[barbara]

bob-a-rama - I'm glad you mentioned lef.com. We offer Life Extension products on our web store. The company has an extensive, well researched product line. The blood tests that they offer are extensive. The tests have to be ordered directly from them however.

 

[barbara]

BS or not?

Environmental groups seem to always rush to call for more regulations. It sounds to me like the farm industry is on board with getting to the core cause without being strapped immediately with regulations that could prove costly and ineffective.


Farms Feed Toxins in Drinking Water

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2014/08/farms-feed-toxins-drinking-water?et_cid=4093088&et_rid=280879682&type=cta

Scientists and farmers agree that phosphorus from agriculture runoff is feeding the blue-green algae blooms on Lake Erie linked to a toxin found in the drinking water of 400,000 people in Ohio and southeastern Michigan last week.

Ohio's political leaders are calling for more studies to find out why the blooms are increasing and how to control them. A number of environmental groups say it's time for strict regulations on the agriculture industry.

But how much of a role do the farms play? Researchers already know some of the answers, yet there are still many unknowns.

The sources

The debate over the algae blooms that produce the toxins found in Toledo's water starts with what is causing them.

Scientists say climate change has brought on more heavy spring rains that are washing fertilizers off farm fields and lawns and causing sewer overflows in cities. All of those combine to dump more phosphorus in the rivers and streams that flow into the lake.

At the same time, scientists believe invasive zebra mussels in Lake Erie have disrupted the food chain so much that it has helped the algae flourish.

Then there is the question of where all the phosphorus is coming from. It's found in farm fertilizers, livestock manure and raw sewage.

The Ohio Phosphorus Task Force — a group in Ohio representing the agriculture industry, environmental researchers and state regulators — concluded nearly two years ago that agriculture was the leading source of the phosphorus. Some researchers say it's as much as two-thirds from agriculture.

That's mainly because half the phosphorus in the lake comes down the Maumee River, which drains 3 million acres of farmland before flowing through Toledo and into the lake — not far from where last week's algae bloom overwhelmed Toledo's water intake.

The unknowns

While it's now widely accepted that much of the phosphorus is coming from farmland, what's much more difficult to pin down is exactly where and why.

There's an assumption that farmers are simply over-fertilizing their fields. Soil tests have shown that about 30 percent of fields have more phosphorus than they need. Cutting down on fertilizing that land would help with the problem.

But industry sales figures also show that farmers are using much less fertilizer because of advanced technology that allows them to apply it just where it's needed. The amount of phosphorus fertilizer sold in Ohio in 2011 was less than half that sold in the mid-1990s.

Another assumption is that the main source of phosphorus is the manure produced by large livestock operations and mega dairies, which have increased dramatically over the past two decades along with the algae blooms.

But there's not enough monitoring right now to know if those mega farms are the culprit, researchers say. "Without soil tests it's totally impossible to determine," said Jeff Reutter, head of the Ohio Sea Grant research lab.

Less than 20 percent of all the agriculture-related phosphorus in western Lake Erie comes from livestock manure while 80 percent is from commercial fertilizer, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resource Conservation Service.

What isn't known is how many of those livestock farms are contributing to the phosphorus problem by spreading manure onto frozen and snow-covered fields in the winter, allowing the phosphorus to wash away and end up in the lake.

The USDA recommends against putting manure on frozen ground. "The extent of how often that happens is a great unknown," said Steve Davis, a watershed specialist in Ohio with the Natural Resource Conservation Service. "It's certainly one of the first things that should stop."

The solutions

The only way to reduce phosphorus in the lake is to control runoff from all sources — farms, sewage systems and leaking septic tanks. Agriculture leaders within Ohio say they are committed to doing that and much research is underway to see what works best.

The farm industry is heavily promoting the idea of using the right amount of fertilizer at the right time and place. Ohio's biggest and most influential agriculture groups also are putting money into research on how to keep phosphorus on the fields.

Among the practices they are looking at are injecting fertilizer into the ground rather than spreading it in pellets on the fields and planting cover crops such as legumes to help soil absorb the phosphorus.

One other area being closely looked at is whether a move in the 1980s to reduce soil erosion by encouraging farmers not to heavily plow their fields has contributed to fertilizer runoff.

While researchers say these are all good ideas, it's not clear how effective they will be.

"That's where the questions still remain. What's going to work?" said Laura Johnston, a research scientist at the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg Univ.