I remember going to see my doctor when I was 19 and for the first time noticed that after telling him what was going on with me, he went over to his computer and looked it up on whatever the fancier doctor version of WebMD is.
Something clicked for me at that moment. Of course, doctors don’t know every condition connected to every symptom, but growing up you kind of assume that they do.
In our society, we view doctors as a special, mystical class of people. They are trained and ordained experts in every health question. When they put on the white coat, they can go on TV and talk about all sorts of health problems, even if they know almost nothing about them.
Thinking back to my own time in the formal education system, almost nothing I learned stuck with me. Most people have this experience, we all know that the stuff we learned for tests goes in and out of our minds in record time. But for doctors, we assume that the medical school training leaves them imparted for life with medical wisdom.
A few years later, I was dealing with some health problems and found the doctors I saw, and the medical system I was dealing with to be incredibly bureaucratic and ineffective. I eventually found a path to healing through a great chiropractor who gave me some recommendations to ask my doctor about. Then it was on to learning on my own and working on the physical and mental factors that we’re contributing to the issues.
This experience made me realize that individuals need to take agency for their own health. They need to be the CEO of their healthcare and make the ultimate decisions for their health because they are the ones with first-hand experience of the problems, but more importantly, they are the ones who will bear the consequences.
In a world with free access to information and better access to practitioners from around the world, relying on your local doctor to be the ultimate arbiter of medical advice does not make any sense.
It can feel overwhelming digging through the amount of information about health topics, but if you truly engage in research and experimentation, you will find your way towards things that work for you.
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