Blog#1 Let’s get it going!
read time 5 minutes
Hello everyone and welcome to my new blog! I’ve been excited about starting this for some time and am glad to see it come together. I appreciate you taking the time to visit! The idea for this blog started a little over a year ago in my last year of residency. Initially hesitant to get things started to due a mountain of internal resistance and imposter syndrome (“another blog man? Ah!”). But deep down in my heart of hearts I knew the potential for this to be quite a useful resource.
This blog was born from several different experiences as both a resident before and now attending physician. In my clinical practice I have noticed an immense gap in the expectation between patient and doctor when it comes to the routine annual well adult visit. One of the foundations of family medicine is preventative care, which side-note, has more or less become a passion of mine. For me, quality of life trumps quantity of life 99% percent of the time. I have succeeded if I prevent the progression or even development of chronic disease by just 1%. When my patients come in for their annual visit, my excitement to address their routine health maintenance (colorectal cancer screening, blood pressure, labs, etc.) is typically drowned out by exactly what I am trying to prevent in the first place, disease or injury. If it’s the 27 year old woman who is seeing me for her well woman exam, my short 20 minute appointment isn’t spent discussing ways to keep her healthy and any necessary screenings (e.g. pap smear). Instead, she has a concern about irregular menstrual bleeding (not a simple thing to fully evaluate). Similarly, the 52 year old man visiting me for his annual wants to discuss his low back pain. Rightfully so, patients want their acute concerns addressed. We live in the moment. We want pain or dysfunction reduced now not later. Unfortunately with these types of visits, the discussion of health maintenance is rarely broached and ultimately kicked down the road. What results is a repetitive cycle of reactive, rather than proactive medicine.
With the constraints of the modern American “churn and burn” health care system with 15-20 minute appointments, I am severely limited in the actual time I have to discuss preventative medicine (which could have quite literally “prevented” their acute complaint in the first place). I can blame the patients, I can blame the system, but the situation isn’t likely to change on its own. I am starting this blog as a resource outside my clinical time to educate my own patients but also to create larger reach to everyone. We are all patients at one point or another.
The difficult part is that this space - health and wellness, preventative medicine, functional medicine, longevity medicine, you name it - is cluttered with a variety of both professionals and charlatans on social media. If your instagram is even remotely like mine, you’ve seen the posts, “Five ways to improve your sleep!” or “Don’t miss this new way to detox.”
Lucky for you my aim with this blog isn’t that. While that type of information can be useful, I am specifically looking to explore the patient-provider relationship more wholly. Who is the best advocate for one’s health? Yourself. It isn’t your physician, family member, friend, or a social media influence. My opinion is that if someone wants to truly improve their health, then he or she needs to take on the responsibility and essentially be their own doctor, their own advocate. The physician role is simply to guide, no longer to act as a “decisioner.” This isn’t just patient-centered care, but patient-informed care (more to come on this topic).
I firmly believe that everyone should have a better baseline understanding of medicine. We each have a body, and should therefore be fundamentally informed how to cultivate it. These health basics have been outsourced to the doctor’s office, but are not even the focus of discussion (as I’ve eluded to above). Ever ask your doctor about what you should be eating? You've likely received an answer as bland as can be.
Maybe this a stretch by some people’s imagination, but here is an example. If a person’s blood pressure is elevated in clinic, the first step is confirming this reading in their home environment with self-measurements. If it continues to be elevated, then we make the diagnosis. It doesn’t always mean we jump to medications, however. I can encourage the patient to improve their blood pressure with exercise, diet, better sleep, etc (i.e. the “lifestyle habits”). But the litmus test for improvement is repeated measurements of blood pressure. If a patient is taking blood pressures at home but has no concept of what the numbers mean or what degree of severity certain elevations mean, then there is no “skin in the game” so to speak.
So to come full circle here, my aim with this blog is to identify important health-related topics that doctors don’t always have enough time to discuss, then write about these health fundamentals that everyone should have a baseline understanding of.
My goal is that this will improve how we, as patients, can interact with our physicians. Ultimately, this would (1) better prevent disease in the first place and (2) help individuals make informed decisions regarding their health when health problems do arise.
Thank you for taking the time to read through this. I hope to provide additional weekly fundamental health insights through the lens of preventative and functional medicine. Beginning with foundational concepts, I will morph the discussion towards more specific health-related topics. Through time, I believe that this blog can be a game changer for you, or anyone, desiring to achieve better quality of life - living healthier for longer.
