Medical Education

Our society is greatly influenced by physician advice and behavior. Only when hospitals banned smoking in the early 1990's did smoking rates start to plummet nationally. The medical profession has to lead in health matters.

Our medical education model is over 100 years old and many commentators have declared it outmoded and sub-optimal. We concentrate on curing disease, not producing health, and the drug industry provides most of the funding med school professors use for their research and career advancement. In recent years big pharma has increased their dominance of medical education by designing a system which enriches researchers and academic leaders. The recent exposure of pay-offs to the top people at Sloan-Kettering in New York (one of the leading cancer research, training and patient care hospitals in the world) is just the tip of the iceberg. The same is true at virtually every research and  training institution in the United States. Since over 80% of health care dollars go to treatment of chronic disease a medical system which prevents and treats these diseases through lifestyle is totally unacceptable to big pharma and the leading academic physicians. The Hippocratic oath's "prevention is preferable to cure" is totally ignored.

The result is medical training where:

          71% of incoming medical students think nutrition is important but only 46% of those graduating do.

          Cardiology training requires no education in nutrition even though the only proven way to prevent and cure atherosclerosis, the cause of heart attacks, is with diet.

          Medical licensure exams have no questions on nutrition.

          Most medical schools ignore the minimal requirement of 25 hours of nutrition training; those that do offer nutrition usually offer irrelevant material.

          94% of practicing physicians now (at last) believe nutrition is important for health but only 14% feel they have any ability to help patients in this regard.

What a mess!  If patients seek out practitioners of lifestyle medicine our model will change. Supply and demand works in our system even if the monied interests of drug and other businesses are paying off institutional leaders.