Here is an excerpt from an interview with a retired medical and wellness doctor…..

Question: Over many decades of healthcare practice you must have seen a fair number of “fails”. People trying to get well but somehow, well, not! Can you tell us about a few?

Answer: Great question! Yes…..pretty-much everyone wants to be well. Or at least pretty much everyone says they want to be well (there may be a subtle and important difference there but we’ll leave that for now). Sure, let me describe a few ways in which people fail in wellness…..

Fads and fashions. Or trends. There have been many. The cabbage-soup-diet. A million TV-special exercise devices. Precise calorie-counting. Energy drinks that claim to offer much more than sugar and caffeine even though those do seem to be the main ingredients. Gluten-free eating (I mean for the vast majority who do not benefit or need such a change – for those with genuine gluten intolerance or coeliac disease it’s another matter of course). The Paleo diet. Countless wonder-supplements (typically lacking any credible supporting science). And more will come. And we have all tried some of these have we not?! But we should learn. Seriously. Too-good-to-be…you know! Stick with more mainstream science and consensus and you’ll do better. Don’t be closed to new developments and changing science (proper science always evolves) but be discerning and cautious.

Ignorance. You hear it all the time…”…doctor said……I don’t know….I didn’t understand…..but I am dong like she said….”. and fair enough we think don’t we? Medicine is an expert field that we can never understand? And yet……the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips 24/7 now and we can both read and think……when you think about it we no longer need to be ignorant and to not-understand our own health. With some guidance from professionals and some proper careful online reading, we can learn. And know. And take charge. Of our own wellness. Ignorance need not be our state when it come to our own health.

Slavish obedience. Following advice without-thought. As a lemming or a sheep might. Perhaps it is your uncle the nurse. Or the TV show on hospitals. Or even your own doctor. No advice should be followed without thought. Really.  It is your life and your health. Do some homework (google). Think. Take charge. By all means lean on experts and get good professional healthcare advice. But understand who is in charge. You.

Old think. Science is ever-questioning and the resulting knowledge ever-evolving. Things we used to “know” are now questioned, or simply wrong in some cases. This is normal and it is good. But we must try to keep up. For quite a time we believed that “fat made fat” in a nutritional sense and we now know it is much more nuanced and complex than that. It was not that long ago that it was not clear if cigarettes were heath-damaging or not! For a tragic number of years we had really-nothing to offer HIV positive patients and so it truly was a hopeless diagnosis – this is now far from the case and most HIV positive people live long and productive lives. There was a time, not long ago, when all vaccines were trusted and considered safe – this no longer appears to be the case for many. The pint is this: try not to get stuck in one way of thinking. In old-think. Knowledge moves. Faster and faster. Try to keep up.

Yes. There are many ways to fail in health and wellness. A great deal comes down to being smart and curious and a bit discerning. But above all, we need personal honesty. Look-in-the-mirror honesty. That is probably the single biggest way to avoid the fails.

Written by Dr Colin Burns