“They take more time to answer your questions than if you have an appointment with them.”
regular exercise, such as the case of a diabetic patient who regularly comes to the Lubbock walks internist Piyush Mittal, MD, leads on the second Satur- day of each month. “He’s [walking] other days also, but certainly on [walk days] he feels that ‘Everybody has been telling me to come out all the time, but with you as a role model, I am able to do it,’” Dr. Mittal said. “And now he has been showing up at each walk.” The first phase of TMA’s 2015 sur-
vey to evaluate Walk With a Doc Texas found 48 percent of participants are meeting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) recommendations for physical activ- ity by walking at least 150 minutes or running for 75 minutes per week. An- other 5 percent are within 10 minutes of reaching one of those benchmarks. The survey also showed Walk With a Doc participants are likely to be pro- active about their own preventive care. (See “Polling Participants,” page 45.)
NATIONAL IMPACT For the first few years of Walk With a Doc’s existence, when it consisted of just one regular walk event, Dr. Sab- gir says he and his colleagues jokingly called their office “Walk With a Doc World Headquarters.” “Probably, people thought we were
crazy, and we were doing it a little bit tongue-in-cheek,” he said. It’s not a joke anymore, now that
Walk With a Doc has expanded its reach worldwide. It started in 2005 with a 101-person
walk that Dr. Sabgir says was more of an event in itself, rather than the be- ginning of an ongoing movement. But Walk With a Doc hired an executive director, and the organization began developing relationships with local businesses. “We had a response from a locally
based international hamburger com- pany here, of all things,” he said. “They loved the idea before we even did our first walk. And we had a bunch of peo- ple tell us things like, ‘Do you know
46 TEXAS MEDICINE November 2015
what you have here? Do you know what this could be?’” But recruiting physicians for the
program proved to be extremely chal- lenging, so the program stopped in 2006. “I missed it,” Dr. Sabgir said. “I
think a lot of the participants missed it.”
They started it again with one walk
in 2007, and Dr. Sabgir and the rest of the organization decided to let Walk With a Doc grow organically. Nation- al press coverage led to requests for Walk With a Doc events around the country, and in 2009, Anthem became a sponsor. The program has grown since then
through what Dr. Sabgir calls “very classic, viral grassroots stuff, and the fire keeps getting bigger.” In Septem- ber, CNN featured Dr. Sabgir and his work on Walk With a Doc as part of a CNN Heroes segment. Calling it “overwhelmingly reward-
ing” to see the program succeed in replication, Dr. Sabgir says Walk With a Doc’s success stems from many phy- sicians “having the same feeling that I do, that they want to do more.” “So many of these things that we
see are ameliorated by regular physi- cal activity, and we’re just not seeing that,” he said. “I would say, anecdotal- ly, about 5 to 10 percent of our patients at most are getting [the right] amount of physical activity. So if we have an inroad to that, it’s almost like a tick- et to Oz. It feels like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I think there’s something we can do about this after years, if not decades, of banging our heads against the wall.’” A national survey of Walk With a
Doc participants for this year showed the following:
• 92.4 percent of participants feel they’re more educated since begin- ning to participate;
• 79.4 percent say they’ve gotten more exercise;
• 78.8 percent feel more empowered in their interactions with health care practitioners, such as speaking
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