When did your doctor last talk to you about your diet? In MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: The $ickness Industry, Big Pharma and Suppressed Cures my co-author James Morcan and I ask this question.
Most will be aware of the old adage, You are what you eat. It seems to us, though, that many members of the medical profession aren’t aware – or, if they are, they consider it an old wives’ tale.
We suspect that more often than not doctors only deign to discuss diet when a patient dares to raise the subject. And then, if your experience is like ours, you’ll be greeted with a frosty stare or, at best, a few mumbled banalities about not over-eating or the importance of a balanced diet or cut down on fats.
Which leads to more (related) questions such as: How long do doctors-in-training spend studying nutrition at medical school, and why isn’t nutrition on the curriculum alongside biochemistry, pathology, physiology and the like?
These questions and more are raised in a very appropriate discussion thread on the ResearchGate.net site. A random selection of comments from that thread follows:
•“We need clinicians to remember to consider nutrition when seeing/treating a patient rather than being a full nutritional expert. However, they should know basics such as basic nutritional needs and guidelines, calculating and interpreting BMI, when to give nutritional support and be aware of the importance of using nutritional screening tools to see if referral to a dietitian is required.”
•“I would be a staunch supporter of making nutrition a major field of study in a medical doctors pursuit of their degree.”
•“Before health care providers can get into…details about individual response to nutrients and talk about personal nutrition, they need to establish their nutrition knowledge and clinical skills foundation. For physicians this needs to happen in medical school and requires a serious effort.”
•“Considering the importance of nutrition for a patient’s recovery from disease and maintenance of health it is surprising that nutrition isn’t a bigger part of conventional medical school education.”
•“It should be within the core responsibilities of doctors to address nutrition in patient care and it is essential that all doctors know the appropriate time to make a dietitian referral.”
•“Why is it so hard to understand that robust familiarity with nutrition is equally or even more important (than surgery training)?”
To add some balance to the discussion, one contributor (from the University of Jordan) to the above thread observes that nutrition is “a specialized field and huge in its content.” He adds, “Medical students (are) overwhelmed by texts, labs, and courses. It requires an evolutionary plan to incorporate nutrition with medicine curricula”.
Medical educators at least pay lip service to the importance of nutrition, and they appear to be in general agreement that there’s not enough instruction on this topic in today’s medical schools.
For example, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) addresses this via its official online site AAFP News. In one article, the writer reports that although most medical schools (in the US) offer some form of nutrition education, only one-quarter require a dedicated nutrition course.
The article continues, “In fact, the amount of nutrition education that medical students receive is so ‘inadequate’ that ‘medical school graduates feel unprepared to intervene in their patients’ care with regard to nutrition,’ according to the UNC preliminary survey results”.
A report published by the US National Library of Medicine in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health concludes that “The amount of nutrition education that medical students receive continues to be inadequate”.
That report summarizes a survey of 109 medical schools, which revealed that “most (103) required some form of nutrition education” of their students. The most disturbing revelation, however, is that “Overall, medical students received 19.6 contact hours of nutrition instruction during their medical school careers”.
The link between diet and health is well proven and, more importantly, widely acknowledged by doctors for ailments such as diabetes and heart disease but are roundly ignored by them in treating other human conditions – cancer being one of those. Indeed, mainstream (Western) medicine seems to go out of its way to discourage cancer patients from making too much of the cancer-diet connection.
The good health site HoneyColony.com neatly addresses this in an article quoting Dr. Carolyn Dean, a medical advisory board member of the nonprofit Nutritional Magnesium Association. She says, “There are many reasons why diet is not stressed in cancer treatment” and “Most of them stem from the fact that medicine does not put any emphasis on nutrition in medical school…In about 3,500 hours of typical medical school training, maybe one, two or three hours’ worth of classes are devoted to basic nutrition”.
There’s a serious disconnect between (most) doctors and the role of nutrition in their patients’ health. Whether you blame those who set the already crowded curricula at medical schools or whether you blame the tunnel vision mainstream medicine has regarding diet, the fact remains there’s a problem…
… If doctors are aware their patients are diet-conscious and if they’re constantly reminded nutrition is important to them, perhaps they’ll fall into line and give it (nutrition) the importance it deserves when it comes to treating people.
Hopefully, this chapter has provided you with some ammunition to fire their way.
Footnote: We acknowledge that the inference that doctors are not nutrition-minded or, for that matter, not supportive of alternative health measures is very much a generalization; we are aware there’s a growing number of physicians (and other health providers) in mainstream medicine who are very knowledgeable about nutrition and alternative health, and who incorporate this knowledge into their everyday practice.
Unfortunately, they are very much in the minority.
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On a lighter note… “First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.” -Steve Martin
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MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: The $ickness Industry, Big Pharma and Suppressed Cures is available via Harvard Bookstore, Waterstones UK & Europe bookstores, public libraries and via Amazon.
The book’s Amazon link is: https://www.amazon.com/MEDICAL-INDUSTRIAL-COMPLEX-Suppressed-Underground/dp/B08CJR21HQ
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Morcan Books & Films 