[quote]LoRez wrote:
[quote]batman730 wrote:
[quote]anonym wrote:
[quote]batman730 wrote:
These avenues have been almost completely ignored by the medical establishment for some time. I’m grateful that they’re beginning to wake up, however slowly.[/quote]
You’ve met quite a few doctors who have trivialized the role of diet and exercise in living a healthy life?[/quote]
Referring mostly to the where their training is.
However, I’ve met a lot of doctors and seen a lot of treatment protocols. Emphasis on nutrition is more of an afterthought in my experience. Pharmacology/surgery is way more in their wheelhouse, again, in my experience.[/quote]
In the words of an actual doctor, “that’s why we refer people to RDs (registered dieticians)”. About the only doctors actually qualified to give nutrition advice beyond the basic “eat healthy” mantra are GI specialists.
It’s not trivialized by any means, but it’s not something they’re trained in. I’d venture a guess that the average T-Nation forum member has a better grasp of nutrition than the average doctor. It’s really just not what doctors do… as much as we may want that to be true.[/quote]
Yep. My wife has been under the care of not less than 12 different physicians from a range of different disciplines over the course of the last 3 years. The overwhelming majority of them have been very caring, consummately professional and extremely competent in their respective specialties. None of them really give any thought to nutrition. As I said, they have performed minor miracles with medical imagery, surgery, pharmacology etc, but nutrition’s not really what they do.
Nutrition questions are of the box-ticking variety and advice is generally confined to a cursory, grade school reiteration of gov’t guidelines (i.e. limit fat and salt, don’t smoke, moderate alcohol etc, etc) which is hardly cutting edge stuff when compared with the advances being made daily on other fronts (i.e. laparoscopic surgery, gene therapy, cancer treatment etc). After the initial “try to eat ‘healthy’ and get some exercise” comments, on the rare occasion that it does get mentioned, there is virtually zero follow up in this area, as compared with the pharmacological stuff where multiple medications are prescribed, progress is monitored on and on-going basis and dosage adjustments are made on a week to week basis. This is where the medical establishment shines.
Incidentally, the only person who did attempt to delve into some type of comprehensive nutritional strategy with my wife was a hospital nutritionist (I believe, as opposed to an RD) and she gave some of the worst, most outdated nutritional advice I have ever heard. Could be she just wasn’t very good at her job, but she was following the guidelines as provided to her by the system she’s working within.
None of this is at all intended as a knock against doctors. I don’t think they “trivialize” the importance of diet and exercise, I just think they are largely ignorant on the subject and more focused on other tools with which they are more skilled and knowledgeable. A plumber doesn’t “trivialize” the importance of electrical work. It’s just not what he does. A given plumber may be somewhat familiar on an individual level, if he takes a personal interest, but it’s not where his training and expertise lie. It’d be ridiculous to criticize a plumber for this, but it would be equally ridiculous to expect him to wire your house, even if he happens to consider himself to be an authority on the subject.
Hopefully this story represents part of a shift in that way of thinking.
