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I'm not saying they key to good health is a big secret. I'm saying we're bad as a society or as human beings at objectively tracking this stuff and correcting n
by dcow 3y ago
I'm not saying they key to good health is a big secret. I'm saying we're bad as a society or as human beings at objectively tracking this stuff and correcting negative trends often before it's too late. I've experimented with my body and nutrition a lot, with noticeable outcomes. You can't eat and know the next day that what you ate had too much refined sugar, or that it was organic and lacked toxins, just be how you feel. It takes weeks of not eating well before you notice anything and then months to years of the habit to gain enough weight to be obese. And some people eat like shit and feel great and don't get fat yet are wildly unhealthy inside. And some people are bigger than others and in pristine health. Diet is a huge part of health, yes, but there's more to health than diet... and how the heck does a person who's e.g. deficient in Vitamin D even know they are unless it's adversely affecting their mood. And even then how do they diagnose it and correct it when doctors are ~~bribed~~ encouraged with gifts to prescribe designer drugs for every problem.
My argument is that this information about your body should be more accessible so people are empowered to learn it and act on it of their own volition. If that were the case I bet we'd see less crack pop science surrounding diets and nutrition. Anyway your car analogy doesn't really hold. I can plug a $100 device into my car and diagnose what's wrong and read any data I want. It will tell me when I need to change the oil. I can look at the tires and see if they've worn past the safe level and replace them as needed. I can't do that with my body. The only consumer devices available are blood glucose and keytone test strips. There's no consumer "full blood panel" what would solve the problem the person I responded to shared. And consider women going through pregnancy, it's very very easy to be missing some key nutrients. It's common practice to supplement with pre-natals for the entire fertile phase of a woman's life. All because a lot of changes happen to your body that are hard to understand subjectively, so just spray and pray with vitamins and iron.
I'm sure this is at some level by design by the AMA. If people had access to low cost blood tests then we'd be undercutting a huge component of the medical industrial complex and the AMA does shady shit to keep doctor salaries high enough to justify all the schooling and certification fees.
Also where did you get that 75% number? Anecdotally it's not accurate. Obesity is higher than it should be but 3 of every 4 people are not obese even by the > 30 BMI metric.
So, again, why would more open access to baseline metabolic metrics be a bad thing?
- dcow 3y agoFinal related point: I establish care when I move to a new location but I have never had a medical provider do something like actively reach out and e.g. schedule me for yearly physicals. The closest thing is people reaching out to administer flu and covid shots. When I was younger I had to have physicals to participate in sports, but as an adult it's like I'm supposed to only reach out to doctors when a problem occurs. It's all reactionary. There's not a good pattern for establishing regular care and maintaining a preventative, nutritional, etc. dialog with a health professional. How do I bill "preventative nutritional consultation" to my insurance provider? We can do it for dental hygiene, why not nutritional and metabolic? The modern state of nutrition feels like pseudo science "neighborhood" gossip. We hated fat. Then we went organic. Then we disliked processed foods. Paleo. Then we hated carbs. Now that's not cool anymore either. When in reality it's probably all of the above. My wife has thyroid problems and they're not diet related (at least we've been told). The whole process of advocating for her health has been exhausting. The resolution of her "case" was not driven by people we were paying to advise us and keep track of things. It was driven by us. We had to make sure medical records showed up in the right spots. We had to make sure appointment scheduling didn't get dropped. We had to reach out to make sure follow up visits and analysis were completed as advised in previous visits directly from the health professionals themselves. I've noticed differences by location where we've lived. It's better where we are now. But it's still very very reactive. Oh you got pregnant? Why didn't you have a conversation with us about starting prenatals? Did we check your TSH levels and make sure you were in a good zone? Shit like that is infuriating... (we did both for the record, but imagine the feeling if you answered no, which I would suspect is all too common).
- chii 3y ago> So, again, why would more open access to baseline metabolic metrics be a bad thing? not a bad thing if you considered it in isolation for a single individual. But for an entire society? The cost of doing so might be quite high, even if there's an economy of scale efficiency improvement for such large amount of testing/diagnostics. The recommended regime of diet, exercise and such, are a solution for most people that doesn't require you to know your own metric (and the example of pregnancy is a non-sequitur because this isn't a normal state of affairs, and when pregnant people can easily choose to do such bloodwork to measure their metrics).