Feeling Your Personal Best By Alice Greene
Is Your Doctor Part of the Problem
I got a call from a close girlfriend of mine recently, who was upset. She’d gone to the doctor for her annual physical, and she was totally unprepared for what her doctor told her. She had gone expecting to hear that she was in amazing shape for her age and given an “atta girl” for how well she takes care of herself. She and I are now in our 50s, and we take pride in the things we do to keep ourselves fit, healthy and youth- ful. But that isn’t how the visit went.
When a Routine Physical is One-Size Fits All
She was seen by a female physi- cian she hadn’t met before, who reviewed her blood work and gave her the routine examination. Then the doctor told her sternly that she was pre-diabetic and her blood sugar levels were as high as they had been six years earlier. She continued to tell her that she was overweight, needed to exercise seven days a week at a
minimum of 30 minutes, change the way she ate and come back in six months to see if she needed to go on medication. This doc- tor didn’t seem to care that my girlfriend regularly exercises, is not actually overweight and had never been told her blood sugar levels were pre-diabetic in the past. She also had no empathy for how hard it would be to fit more into an already busy sched- ule.
It was all a shock and delivered with scare tactics to force my friend to comply or else. On top of that, the doctor took a quick look at two moles on her back and said they were pre-cancerous and needed to be addressed quickly. How could she have been in a position to judge that, having never seen them before? Can you imagine what it was like to walk out of that appointment? Not only was my girlfriend rattled, worried and a bit angry, she was depressed by the experience.
August/September 2012
Getting a Second Opinion and Perspective
She was trying to figure out how to deal with her emotions and how to fit more exercise and better meal preparation into her busy schedule as a single mother working two jobs when she called me. On the one hand she wanted to comply, even though it was ex- treme. On the other, she wanted a second opinion. She got one for the moles, which were fine, and I offered one for exercising and eating.
First of all it is not ideal to exer- cise seven days a week unless you are doing very moderate levels of an activity, because your body needs time for rest at least once a week. Secondly it is unrealistic to expect anyone to radically alter their schedule over-
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