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If your Western doctor is not suggesting regular exercise and a balanced diet to prevent chronic conditions before giving you a pill then they are not using an

If your Western doctor is not suggesting regular exercise and a balanced diet to prevent chronic conditions before giving you a pill then they are not using an evidence-based approach.

m463 6y ago
No doctor I have gone to in recent memory has said anything like that to me, ever. I remember once when a test result got close to a threshold, I was told, "this test result is a little high, we should work at getting that down, and if it stays high we can pursue medicine to bring it down." Could this merely be part of some non-confrontational advice? Maybe waiting for me to ask about exercise before answering? On the other hand, I have had two friends whose relationships soured with their doctor by giving unwarranted advice. One friend smoked. The other was overweight. The doctors pursued the smoking/weight issue to the exclusion of what they were coming in for, and neither friend went back to that doctor.
- Quekid5 6y ago
  I think it bears saying that doctors are people too, that includes all the flaws/biases/etc. that we all succumb to. There is a huge issue that there is no feedback loop when doctors are incompetent or cannot be bothered to actually engage -- as your friends' experience suggests, the doctor has no way (or incentive, really, if they're just trying to satisfy a metric) to find out if they actually helped or not. The only filtering mechanism seems to be either a) passed medical school, or b) gross incompetence which gets reported to an authority, but patients themselves (by definition) usually cannot judge if a doctor is giving them actively bad/dangerous advice. Metrics are becoming a plague in and of itself... I live somewhere in Scandiwegia, and when I reserve a time slot with my doctor, the biggest time slot I could get was 10 minutes. That's 10 minutes to discuss a complex lifelong pain-related issue which may have genetics playing into it, etc. etc. It's absolutely insane for complex issues, but I'm betting a lot of these issues are essentially invisible to the system because people just give up and take (too many) painkillers. Trying to get a referral to experts in the type of pain I experience is of course heavily gatekept, and means I have to face a whole battery of other non-specialists (neuoroligists, etc.) who can only give wholly inconclusive answers as to whether I'm "worthy" of getting to talk to the specialists who could probably give me a proper diagnosis pretty quickly. Of course, most things (general practitioner) doctors see are probably pretty simple and can handily be handled in 10 minutes, but it just gets very frustrating when it isn't that simple. EDIT: Just wanted to add that none of this means that TCM (or alternative medicine in general) necessarily has any worth. The science of 'Western' medicine is overall really solid, but the systems around engaging with patients is really screwed up right now.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
The unfortunate reality is that many doctors are actually pretty shit at their job, just like most other professions.
throwaway9482 6y ago
Regular exercise and a balanced diet to not prevent chronic diseases. That’s kind of OP’s whole point. In western medicine we don’t have any philosophy for where a bunch of long term health issues come from. Now if you study aruveyda, they’ll have a lot to say about this banyanbotanicals.com has some great articles about this, check out their six tastes article for example

If your Western doctor is not suggesting regular exercise and a balanced diet to prevent chronic conditions before giving you a pill then they are not using an evidence-based approach.

m463 6y ago

No doctor I have gone to in recent memory has said anything like that to me, ever. I remember once when a test result got close to a threshold, I was told, "this test result is a little high, we should work at getting that down, and if it stays high we can pursue medicine to bring it down." Could this merely be part of some non-confrontational advice? Maybe waiting for me to ask about exercise before answering? On the other hand, I have had two friends whose relationships soured with their doctor by giving unwarranted advice. One friend smoked. The other was overweight. The doctors pursued the smoking/weight issue to the exclusion of what they were coming in for, and neither friend went back to that doctor.

Quekid5 6y ago
I think it bears saying that doctors are people too, that includes all the flaws/biases/etc. that we all succumb to. There is a huge issue that there is no feedback loop when doctors are incompetent or cannot be bothered to actually engage -- as your friends' experience suggests, the doctor has no way (or incentive, really, if they're just trying to satisfy a metric) to find out if they actually helped or not. The only filtering mechanism seems to be either a) passed medical school, or b) gross incompetence which gets reported to an authority, but patients themselves (by definition) usually cannot judge if a doctor is giving them actively bad/dangerous advice. Metrics are becoming a plague in and of itself... I live somewhere in Scandiwegia, and when I reserve a time slot with my doctor, the biggest time slot I could get was 10 minutes. That's 10 minutes to discuss a complex lifelong pain-related issue which may have genetics playing into it, etc. etc. It's absolutely insane for complex issues, but I'm betting a lot of these issues are essentially invisible to the system because people just give up and take (too many) painkillers. Trying to get a referral to experts in the type of pain I experience is of course heavily gatekept, and means I have to face a whole battery of other non-specialists (neuoroligists, etc.) who can only give wholly inconclusive answers as to whether I'm "worthy" of getting to talk to the specialists who could probably give me a proper diagnosis pretty quickly. Of course, most things (general practitioner) doctors see are probably pretty simple and can handily be handled in 10 minutes, but it just gets very frustrating when it isn't that simple. EDIT: Just wanted to add that none of this means that TCM (or alternative medicine in general) necessarily has any worth. The science of 'Western' medicine is overall really solid, but the systems around engaging with patients is really screwed up right now.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

The unfortunate reality is that many doctors are actually pretty shit at their job, just like most other professions.

throwaway9482 6y ago

Regular exercise and a balanced diet to not prevent chronic diseases. That’s kind of OP’s whole point. In western medicine we don’t have any philosophy for where a bunch of long term health issues come from. Now if you study aruveyda, they’ll have a lot to say about this banyanbotanicals.com has some great articles about this, check out their six tastes article for example