What? You Haven’t Gotten Your Stent Yet?

Over the last 30 months of invading your email with this weekly diatribe, I’ve frequently quoted a fellow named Katz, as in Dr. David Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM. (I don’t have the time to look up all those credentials – feel free).

Dr. Katz is very quotable. I first got hooked on Dr. Katz with a quote that I heard him say several years ago in a video recording of him addressing a room full of his peers.  He said:

“We already know all that we need to know to reduce, by 80%, the five major killers in our country.  We don’t need any more fancy drugs or equipment or more Nobel Prizes.  We know all we need to know today.”

He wasn’t admonishing the general public with that.  He was sort of “in the faces” of his peers, saying that physicians need to be more “preventative” in their patient care than “curative.”  At least that’s the way I interpreted his statement.

Health advice vs medical advice

Dr. Katz separates himself from much of his profession by being an advocate of lifestyle as the route to good health versus the “drug it or cut-it-out” methods of our broken, profit-driven health-care/disease-care system.

It’s also safe to say the food industry would like him to disappear because of the truth he speaks about their “health-destroying” practices.

So when I saw the following quote appear in an article he posted on LinkedIn entitled “The Disease Delusion”, he once again gripped me with his spot-on prose about how far off the rails we are in our current culture.

“America runs on coronary artery disease.

 Coronary artery disease is fully embraced in our culture as a veritable rite of passage. If, at a certain age, you don’t have a CABG (coronary artery bypass grafting) scar for show and tell, or at least an anecdote about the particular intracoronary stent you’ve received, you are the odd man (or woman) out, the cultural anomaly. Real Americans, and increasingly real residents of all the world’s developed countries, get stents! One is all but embarrassed not to have one.”

Here’s a link to the full article.

 I admire Dr. Katz for his position on real health and for his creative way of writing about it.  So, I’m keeping this week’s post short to let him do the talking.

You can find additional creative paragraphs in the article, like this one:

“The distal, or root causes, are a lifestyle also subordinate to the dictates of culture- a culture that runs on Dunkin; peddles multicolored marshmallows as part of a complete breakfast; and conflates the Olympics with a trifecta of fast food, junk food, and sugar-sweetened beverages.”

I so wish I’d said that.

Please use this post to read the article and get acquainted with Dr. Katz and his raw style of unveiling the truth about how we’ve lost our way in self-care.

I hope you will follow him.

I publish weekly on Mondays at 5 p.m. Mountain.  If you haven’t, you can subscribe at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”