The Best Thing a Patient Can Do to Stay Healthy
Posted by GI Monitor
This WSJ video presents a pretty good overview of what some patients are doing to take control of their health. In this rapidly evolving era of consumer health, its super important that neither the patient nor the doctor sees the "Health Hacker" model as trumping the guidance of an educated health care provider. The right model is a partnership between data collection and data analysis.
My surgeon once said to me "The dumbest body is smarter than the smartest doctor." I agree with him and do my best to listen to my body and effectively communicate this data. But I leverage my doctor's medical training to determine the validity of potential correlations extracted from the data I collect. Many years of medical education and practice makes my physician much more qualified to analyze my medical data. I collect and communicate my data, but we make sense of it. The best thing a patient can do to keep healthy is maintain the health of the relationship with their doctor.
