Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Article Comments

The right balance for good health

I realize that my last post has probably left you wondering what on earth bulldozers and ballerinas have to do with medicine.  Well, let me lead you down my little mental garden path here and explain.

The dancing event took place right next to the National Academy of Sciences, where the Institute of Medicine (IOM) holds its regular meetings.  It was all the more humorous to see these bulldozers (with rose petal-filled buckets) participating in this awkward dance – right in front of the hallowed halls of medicine’s most prestigious scientific body.  As I thought about what the IOM stands for – the pursuit of truth through objective scientific analysis – and what these ballerinas were up to (reveling in the whimsy of life) it struck me that good medicine might actually combine the two.

Clearly, there are aspects of a healthy life that cannot be well defined by science.  Love, peace, and joyfulness are all nourishing to the mind and body – but quantifying them is rather difficult.  The things that grandma taught us – get your beauty rest, be kind to others, get lots of fresh air, marry a loving man (or woman) – are great medicine, and should be the foundation for a life in balance.

However, the science of medicine is also critically important.  The media thrives on exaggeration and controversy.  If there were a mountain of sand in front of us, and we had the choice to move it with a bulldozer or a teaspoon – the media would have us convinced that the spoon was equally effective.  And this is why we are constantly misled about treatments – we hear about efficacy, but we don’t hear about the relative effectiveness compared to other therapies.  So cinnamon, for example, is touted as a great new treatment for diabetes, when in fact it is only a teaspoon compared to the bulldozer of insulin.

And so I guess I would summarize my musings this way: good health is a dance near the IOM, with bulldozers instead of teaspoons.This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.


You may also like these posts

    None Found

Read comments »


Comments are closed.

Return to article »

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles