Bird's Eye View

I was speaking with a patient and I said something just in passing that has stuck with me and rattled around in my brain enough that it's found its way onto my blog.  I was describing my experience with people in their lives and how in any given day I can have a pretty good idea of where people are going to head based on their experiences up to this point and used the expression, "Bird's eye view" about people's lives.  In any given day I get to see people in their teens, 30s, 50s, 80s, and everywhere in between.  This gives me an interesting perspective and look into where decisions take us.

It's kind of like looking at a graph of compound interest.  If you have a $1000 and it grows by 7%, 9%, or 11% per year there isn't much difference between the graph lines for the first number of years.  This is much the same as health.  Most of the people my age that I see (or honestly don't see much in my clinic) are fairly healthy and don't come in much.  They don't have chronic diseases or  lot of medications.  Now there are always some people who just have bad luck or bad genes or have made a made bad choices combined with bad genes and are much sicker than the rest, but as a whole 30 year olds are pretty healthy.  This difference between people tends to magnify with age. 

I see a lot of people in my clinic who are Mom and Dad's age and I always have to do a double take when I see them because most of them don't look as good and certainly don't function as well as Mom and Dad.  Their decisions become apparent.  If they smoke, this is doubly evident.  I don't see very many 80 year olds who smoke and I see no 90 year olds who do.  I don't see many 85 year olds who are significantly overweight.  Most of the people who have aged well have done similar things; stay physically active, stay mentally active, and don't get significantly overweight. 

Now the thing I love about Medicine is how amazing the human body is.  You abuse it and kick it around a lot of years and you can tell, but it's pretty resilient.  If you change your ways and start taking care of it with some exercise, plant-based nutrition, and weight-loss, it is absolutely amazing how quickly it can bounce back.  It's not going to get back to where it could have been without all that punishment, but you can have an amazing recovery.  If only I could help people see that.