Monday, June 15, 2015

America’s New 37-Year-Old Surgeon General Believes Every Man Should Take His Advice (and So Do We)

Workout Tips

Vivek Murthy, M.D. is not just the youngest U.S. surgeon general since the 19th century. He's also the first to grow up with the Internet.

While it seems improbable that a 37-year-old should hold the office (along with the official rank of vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps), it's not so strange to Dr. Murthy. He's used to doing things ahead of schedule. Born in 1977 in England, he moved with his Indian-born parents to the U.S. three years later, grew up in Miami (where he became a naturalized citizen), graduated magna cum laude from Harvard at 19, and went on to get both an M.D. and an MBA at Yale.

He cofounded Doctors for Obama in 2008, just two years after completing his residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, with the goal of getting medical professionals involved in reforming the healthcare system. The organization rebranded itself as Doctors for America in 2009, with Murthy serving as its president.

The only brake on his path to becoming the nation's most visible physician was applied by Republicans in the U.S. Senate. He was nominated by the president in November 2013, but wasn't confirmed until December 2014. The holdup was his support of gun-control laws, which he regards as a public safety issue.

He spoke to us by phone from Washington to promote the government's newly launched Healthy Self campaign, the goal of which is to get the millions of Americans who now have health insurance through the Affordable Care Act to actually use it.

The following interview was lightly edited for length and clarity, and to make the questions sound better than they actually were.

Since this is Men's Health, we'll start with the most important question: What's your workout like?

I do a number of things to stay healthy . . .

Let's start with abs, and work our way up from there.

(Laughs) Okay. If it's abs you're interested in, then it's crunches that I do.

I also run about three times a week, outdoors or on the treadmill, depending on the weather. I've gotten into the seven-minute workout [from the New York Times], so I do that in between.

I try to convert as many of my meetings into walking meetings as possible. Taking 30 minutes you might spend sitting at a table and actually walking and talking, I find, helps me think better. I try to avoid sitting whenever possible.

What about your diet?

I would describe myself as a pescetarian. I eat fish, in addition to what's largely a vegetarian diet.

I wanted to start with diet and exercise because prevention really starts there, doesn't it? Aren't lifestyle choices the key to lifelong health?

Oh yeah, diet and exercise are cornerstones of prevention. I think of prevention in two baskets: the preventive services you can get if you went to the doctor, or went to see a nurse, like vaccines and blood pressure screening; and there's also what I think of as lifestyle prevention, the decisions we can make in our own lives around diet, around physical activity, around the precautions we take to prevent injury.

You've been thinking about public health for a long time. I read that you warned about violence in cartoons in a speech you gave in high school.  

I may have. I don't recall exactly. But I was concerned about violence, and I remain concerned about violence today. I grew up in Miami. We had a number of episodes of violence in my school, and we also had a number of kids who were the victims of violence. It was something that weighed on me, and weighed on many of us.

Your father has a medical clinic in Miami. What kind of practice is it?

He's a family medicine doctor. He has a primary care clinic, which he started in 1985 and has been running ever since. My sister, who's also a family medicine doctor, works with him now.

I spent a lot of time there as a kid–filing papers, or opening mail, or cleaning the office. It was a great experience, but it also gave me a window into what it was like for my father to care for patients. I didn't understand a lot of the science behind what was going on, but what I did see were these wonderful relationships that my dad–and my mom, who helped build the clinic–were building with patients over time. That really inspired me.

What I remember about the 1980s is how many people smoked, and how few worked out. Were you old enough to look at those patients and think of the damage they were doing to themselves, and how avoidable some of their medical issues must have been?

I remember seeing a lot of people smoking, sometimes right outside the school. That struck me as something that was really bad. I knew that tobacco and smoking were bad for you.

But I also remember in my father's clinic that sometimes he would come out in between patients and he would talk to me in general about the kinds of things he was seeing. He would talk to me about diabetes, about heart disease. I came to understand that while people might look healthy on the outside, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't need to get medical care, or don't need preventive care.

Aren't people who care about fitness and diet–Men's Health readers, in other words–already following up on these things? I'm kind of worried that we're preaching to the converted here.

People who're surrounded by other folks who're healthy, who read about diet and are physically active, sure, they tend to pay more attention to health information. Which is why our office, in collaboration with the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, is launching the Healthy Self Campaign.

It's important that we get the message out to everybody, and in particular that it's important to take advantage of the new preventive services that are now available.

But how do you get the attention of people who most need to hear this message?

We're working to build partnerships with companies, with nonprofit organizations, with faith groups, so we can go to communities, engage messengers that people trust on a variety of issues, and talk to them about health and about prevention.

When I was a kid, who did I listen to? I listened to my parents and I listened to my teachers.

Dr. Murthy, with all due respect, you must've been a really unusual kid. Or you had unusually great parents and teachers. They're not all like that.  

(Laughs) I hear you. This is why it's so important for us to build a broad set of messengers for this campaign. Not everyone trusts the same source. We have to take the information to where they are.

Let's talk specifically about the Men's Health reader. We know he's worried about his abs and his sexual performance, because those are the questions we get. But what should he be worried about?

If you look at the data, you see men on average live less healthy lives, and die five years earlier than women. In minority communities these disparities are even greater. And while you may go to the gym and lift, or go running, and have abs that look great, and think you're in great shape, you can't always judge your health by how you look in the mirror. That's why it's important to go to the doctor and to take advantage of preventive services.

But some health risks you can see in the mirror, right? Especially if you stand sideways

Sometimes you can tell when you're not in good shape. But not always. Men, especially younger men, have a sense of invincibility, a sense that they're never really going to get sick, and if they just keep going to the gym and working out, that's going to keep them healthy for the rest of their lives.

But sometimes that's not enough, and the only way to know if you have silent conditions, like high blood pressure or high cholesterol, is to go to the doctor and get the screenings.

If your readers have any questions about what kind of preventive services are indicated for them, they can go to healthfinder.gov, plug in their age and their gender, and it'll generate a list of the preventive services that are indicated for them at this time in their life.

Do you look to past surgeons general as role models?  

My favorite surgeon general growing up was C. Everett Koop.

It was the beard, right?

(Laughs) I did like the beard. But what I loved about him was his willingness to step up and speak out about tough issues that were impacting our country. At that time it was tobacco and HIV.

The challenges each surgeon general faced have been different. How people communicate has been different. That's more true in 2015 than ever before.

So while I take lessons from the past, I recognize that we have to develop new methods of communicating with the public, that we have to develop new approaches to engaging a broad sector of the community. To change and improve people's health is going to require a real grassroots effort. That's what I'm interested in helping to build during my time as surgeon general.

Last question: Since you're a vice admiral, I have to ask if you have any actual vices

(Laughs) All of us have vices, and I'm no different. I have a sweet tooth, and I love dessert. When you walk around here in D.C., you see a lot of shops with great desserts. 

 

Workout Tips

The post America’s New 37-Year-Old Surgeon General Believes Every Man Should Take His Advice (and So Do We) appeared first on Workout Tips.


http://ift.tt/1G7Utcc

No comments:

Post a Comment