I think it’s important that we all speak our beliefs and values through our actions, and as you mentioned, it’s unfortunate that doctors are prevented from doing this. How can a doctor who is encouraged to overwork themselves effectively show their patients to not do the same? I figure this to be one of the many reasons why most physicians don’t pay as much attention to lifestyle as they should.

The cap on acceptance is unfortunate as well and I assume that it’s done to preserve the prestige of the more highly regarded schools which encourages the arrogance that this article is about.

What’s striking to me from this article and discussion is the effective conditioning by the medical culture to use statistics as a way to avoid progress, especially when it deviates from dogma. And that the great hypocrisy is that doctors themselves are in many ways prevented from having a healthy lifestyle. Oh, there’s not enough doctors, they say. But there’s actually a cap on how many medical students are accepted each year. Meaning, we have a limit to how many doctors we *can* have, and we’re under supplied. Now why would that be?

I think it’s great that this doctor has such great results. Even with this type of success, supplements aren’t always the answer and it’s still important for doctors to have a holistic and integrative perspective and consider lifestyle factors and other forms of therapy.

Does this doctor have a website?

I agree that this is very relevant to health care reform. In fact, I wrote an article about this not too long ago.

Exactly! The prospect of a happy future should be more than enough motivation to live a healthy lifestyle, but for many people and a variety of reasons, it’s unfortunately not. I hope I am changing that for at least a few people.

It seems that the Mayo Clinic can shield its doctors from the pressure of insurance companies and allow them to spend more time with patients. That’s great! The infamous 5 minute visit is definitely a problem with conventional medicine.

You hit it right on with “This is why it’s so important to educate yourself and take responsibility for what you choose to believe and the resulting decisions that you make.”

This is true in whatever one does. But with ones own health why would one not want to know more than one persons trained opinion on what ails them. Sure enough, opinions and test results can help one make a better decision but the energy one puts in the endeavor should not be any less than one puts in shopping for a new home.

Today’s mainstream medical profession is at its best at relieving patient symptoms but at its worse at relieving the underlying causes of the symptoms. I believe this is true because many of the cures for the causes of many ailments are too strong for individual professionals to cope with; behavior modification, environmental degradation, and the patient economic standing.

The profession has taken this easy route to patient care and Hippocratic code has been superceded with the profit motive. The outcome of this is soaring health care costs. Until doctors are put on a salary and work for medical institutions where a patients are treated by a team of doctors with different views and perspectives will we start to get the care we deserve at a reasonable price. Check out the medical practice of the Mayo Clinic.