Expert Debunks Health and Medical Misconceptions
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- June 6, 2023
British Cardiologist & Author, Dr Aseem Malhotra debunks three major health, wellbeing, and medical misconceptions.
Dr Malhotra, known worldwide for his expertise in the prevention of heart disease, spoke to podcast legend and serial entrepreneur, Ellie McKay, host of popular On A Mission Podcast show. He gave key insight into the medical community and shared his Expert views on health:
1.Work and relationship stress are the TWO biggest causes of stress
“Chronic psychological stress is a public health problem. I wrote about this in my book – the two BIGGEST causes of stress for people are work and relationship stress.
If you look at the conventional risk factors for heart disease, such as, smoking or high blood pressure, or type two diabetes, then the risk of heart disease or heart attack from having chronic psychological stress (which affects many people, probably not most) is the same as being a smoker or being type two diabetic or having high blood pressure”.
2. Quite often doctors put their own interests first
“Often doctors will be putting their own interests first ahead of the interests of the patient. So, I wrote this piece for a newspaper, and they titled it, “I mend hearts: Then I see our hospitals serve junk food by our hospitals”. With my seniors, the consultants and the bosses, there was a kind of an indifference kind of attitude, and I remember one of them saying to me, kind of tongue in cheek, but you know, many truths are spoken in jest, why are you so bothered about prevention? You’re going to ruin the business”.
3. Half of the information that Doctors are taught at medical school is obsolete within five years and over treatment is an issue
“We start from addressing a sociocultural problem, which is a perception that modern medicine is objective and is an exact science, when actually it’s not. You’ll be surprised that the majority of doctors don’t even know that a lot of it is cultural.
Movies and these medical dramas reinforce these false beliefs about the power of modern medicine.
There are so many amazing things we do in medicine but unfortunately a lot of what we do in medicine now has gone too far down the side of ‘over treatment’ by giving people pills aren’t really benefiting that much. And that’s really at the root of our health crisis”.
