Beware of getting lifestyle advice from a doctor!

Your doctor may give you advice on lifestyle changes you can make to be healthier…but is that advice always worth taking? Watch this short video to find out!

Would you take financial advice from an advisor who is on welfare? Would you take fashion advice from a person still dressed in clothes from 1995? Hopefully not! So make sure that your doctor is also able to live by his or her own advice!

Many doctors are excellent at giving advice about what to eat, how to quit smoking, how to stop drinking, and how to feel and look better and healthier…but most are not so skilled at giving this advice. One of the big reasons is that they have not figured it out for themselves! Another big reason is that we doctors are not really trained to dispense good preventive advice…and let’s face it, we are often just too busy!

I think we also need to address the fact that physicians are often not really up-to-date on the best ways to live a healthy lifestyle! We mostly focus on disease treatment, and as a profession we don’t really know exactly what lifestyle changes make the most sense. We are hesitant to spend precious time promoting ideas if they do not have strong scientific evidence behind them, and most lifestyle interventions are barely studied when compared to the way we study drugs or procedures. So it may also boil down to the fact that we simply don’t know what to recommend!

What do you think? Where should you get good advice on diet, exercise, and lifestyle? The internet? Your local chiropractor or lifestyle coach? Be careful…it’s buyer-beware out there and everyone is looking to sell you something!

About Frederick Gandolfo, MD

Dr. Gandolfo is a board-certified gastroenterologist in Long Island, NY. He is the founder of Retroflexions.com and enjoys writing about healthy living and the practice of medicine. He started his solo practice, Precision Digestive Care, in 2018.