This will be a VERY brief post. I just wanted to announce two things:
First off, our practice was featured this week in the local newspaper. Find a copy of the Sippican Week and turn to page 17, or else click here to read the story. Thanks to reporter Erez Ben-Akiva for taking the time to stop by the office and get to know us.
By way of reminder, this Sunday (June 30) we will be hosting an open house along with four other Marion businesses as part of the “Dose of Wellness” event. Feel free to drop by from 8am-12pm on Sunday to see the office, meet us, and have a complimentary body composition scan. You can read my prior blog post here for more details.
As I’ve often written on this blog, one of my motivations for leaving corporate medicine and starting my own boutique practice is the opportunity to work much more extensively with my patients on lifestyle and other “holistic” modes of care, rather than working in an environment where the time pressures and financial incentives are oriented towards treating every problem that comes my way with a pill. As I’ve also written, this is not because I think pills are always, and in all situations, bad, but rather because lifestyle is usually much more effective than pills for promoting health and longevity; because a healthy lifestyle has (unlike pills) no negative side effects; and because it gives me a more rounded set of tools with which to help my patients. But let me add another reason why it’s best to avoid pills when reasonably possible: medicine is a big business, and like all big business, sometimes prone to corruption.
So annoying, in fact, that I googled it, and found out that there’s a whole culture of people out there who find the ad equally repellent. Many, unfortunately, have commented on the size of the main actress, and the backlash against the backlash against the commercial (isn’t everything in America these days a backlash against a backlash?) is that the haters of the commercial are simply “fat shaming” the actress. So let me state right off the bat that indeed, fat shaming is a horrible thing, and my objection to the commercial has nothing to do with the fact that the lead actress is overweight.
Rather, what really irritates me about the commercial (other than the cloyingly obnoxious jingle) is that it perpetuates the great pharmaceutical lie about type 2 diabetes: namely, that it’s an incurable disease that is best controlled with medication. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that type 2 diabetes is often curable, and almost always manageable, with lifestyle modification, and – provided they make the correct changes – many type 2 diabetics don’t require any medication at all.
In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in healthcare related content on the internet. Podcasts by figures such as Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, Rhonda Patrick, Ken Berry, and Gabrielle Lyon, to name a few, have become extremely popular. Typically these podcasts take a health issue and dissect it for the average person, often with a bit of a different perspective than is found in mainstream medicine. And while I don’t agree with every single thing that each of the above doctors says or touts, I think that overall these folks do a great service to the American (and global) public by empowering people to learn more about how to take charge of their own health.
I’m excited to announce that on Sunday, June 30, we will be participating in “A Dose of Wellness,” a multi-business open house here in Marion.
On that date, anybody in the community is welcome to drop by our office (no appointment needed) between 8:00 am and 12:00 noon to get a free tour of our office, meet me, and learn more about the practice. And, as an added bonus, anybody who comes in that morning will be given a free body composition scan with my Styku device (see image below for an example scan – for best results, wear tight/form fitting clothes). In addition, any visitors will be entered into a raffle for a complimentary red light treatment session.
