I want to talk a bit about seeing the doctor.
Many Americans go to the doctor just about any time they get sick, even when the illness can only heal on its own (like a cold). And then we wonder why healthcare has gotten so expensive.
The overlooked prime contributor to health problems is people’s own lifestyle habits. A diet heavy in processed food, light on natural whole food, a lifestyle devoid of physical activity and sufficient sleep, and the resulting penchant for quick, rampant obesity are all easy contributors to nearly all of America’s most common health problems, from chronic colds to heart attacks to even cancer.
You are what you eat and what you do. Your body is the scoreboard for the health of your lifestyle. It usually won’t lie.
A doctor will rarely do more than blithely address a patient’s need to improve their lifestyle, and to their credit there isn’t much more they can do than that: Most of a patient’s contributions to their own bad health are a product of bad habits that a doctor can’t really do anything to address.
A doctor can’t stand over you 24/7 and rouse you from the chair to exercise or slap the processed food out of your hand. They know you need to fix your diet and can tell you so when you visit them, but that’s about as far as they can go.
So that leaves the person in the mirror. To be honest, most people lack a sense of accountability. This is why so many people go to the doctor far too often for just about every ailment, regardless of how much can be done about it.
You can avoid going to the doctor most times, and if you’re reading this chances are you have already taken far more steps to address your health than the average person. You have the ability to take your own countermeasures, in many cases more effective than anything you could pay a doctor to prescribe you.
A good metaphor for this approach: Let’s say you accidentally knock a small hole in the drywall of your apartment. Whoops!
You can either call the maintenance guy to come fix it, possibly costing yourself $50-100 for the repair and labor, possibly costing yourself part of your security deposit, or even a higher rent the next time you renew your lease.
Or you can buy a wall repair kit at a store like Home Depot for $10-15, find and buy a small can of some matching paint for even less, and quickly patch it up yourself.
And you can do the same thing with your health, because many of your health problems can be addressed by paying attention to how you handle your diet, your sleep, your exercise and your emotions.