Key Story Summary:
- Most pharmacy students don’t meet health behavior recommendations.
- The Healthy Pharmacist attended a week-long health communications course at Tufts Medical School which provided valuable insights on how to get a message across.
- To best achieve the The Healthy Pharmacist’s mission, health professionals must first practice what they preach.
You know about it. You probably know what to do about it. But most likely you don’t do it enough. Why is that?
I’m speaking here about health, wellness, and taking time for yourself. We all know the general ideas to be healthier: eat vegetables, get exercise, stress less. These are the simple keys to living a healthier life and you’d probably agree that most doctors in the healthcare system believe this, too.
It would be surprising to find out if health professionals do not practice the exact behaviors they ought to be recommending to those they treat. That would make them hypocrites, right? But not Hippocrates, the Greek physician and founder of Western medicine, who guides the ethics of all medical professionals and said, “let food be thy medicine.” Hippocrates would have definitely recommended health professionals to practice what they preach and live a healthful life.
But in fact, from my research presented in New Orleans this past December, the soon-to-be educators who should be the healthiest, are not, but those who had better health behaviors were more likely to encourage their patients to become healthier. Although this research specifically studied pharmacy students in the Massachusetts area, results linking healthy behaviors among health professionals to improved patient education have been demonstrated for other health providers. You’d think that studying health and disease all day would lead to a greater responsibility to maintain one’s own health. Apparently not. It’s embarrassing how future “health” professionals uphold their societal title.
But I’ll shift some of the blame away from the students onto two groups: 1. Those responsible for creating the medical curriculum and 2. The authorities that allow us to sicken ourselves through the sparse preventative health research, pervasive junk food marketing, and lack of encouragement to be active.
Point 1: Our system is built in a way that emphasizes things going wrong, i.e. disease, and instead needs to shift to studying health and understanding the science behind maintaining wellness. The medical curriculum creators realize the topic of health is lacking and still do little to change.
Point 2: First, preventative health research is sparse because there is little profit to be made keeping people healthy. This is why drug companies dominate our economic system and focus on incremental improvements versus outright disease prevention. Second, the advertisements of junk food targeting highly exploitable children are increasing , creating a new generation of people ignorant to their own health interests. Lastly, with an ever more competitive workplace with demanding hours, people feel increasingly stressed and place less emphasis on self-care. This leads to 1. more stress, 2. less exercise and 3. increased morbidity.
Besides the lack of education and encouragement of healthy behaviors, one of the many reasons that society and students aren’t eating as well as we should may be because of the confusing and conflicting message of health. The flip-flops on what is healthy tend to cause people to give up eating well, thinking whatever they eat will again come into the halo of health. Understandably so, as we have been raised in a culture where we should avoid eating fat (think Snackwells) and cholesterol and instead eat up to 12 servings of bread or pasta. Whereas now, the myth of fat-avoidance is being exposed, cholesterol is not a “nutrient of concern“, and refined grains are one food group linked to diabetes and obesity. What kind of message does this send to the consumer and health professional when our national nutrition guidelines make a complete 180 in a matter of a few decades?
Nutrition is a science and, by definition, continually changes as new data improves upon our understanding of the way the world works. Unfortunately, constantly changing and conflicting messages don’t stick well in our minds and can lead to a mistrust of future information. It’s hard to unlearn a previously formed idea.
To achieve a coherent, uniform, lasting message, proper communication is undeniably important. My employer also realized this and invited me to attend a week-long course on health communications and social media at Tufts Medical School last week. Although the purpose was to assist with a communications strategy for my employer, I was able to glean some key insights for The Healthy Pharmacist.
By walking through case studies of successful and unsuccessful communication strategies, I noticed that the best organizations and campaigns had clear, consistent, and focused messaging. They had a vision, a mission, and actions that resonate with people, are easily understood, and all tie together. These organizations got their simple and direct message to stick in peoples’ minds.
Reflecting on this course, I deliberated on the mission of The Healthy Pharmacist. Was it to spread health information or to provide tasty recipes and workout routines? No…too many critics and bloggers are sharing their misinformed, pseudo-health knowledge.
What I did realize was that two things made me unique:
1. I went through pharmacy school completely frustrated with the way education on health was emphasized and taught. My courses spent so much effort educating on disease management with medications that it perplexed me no one questioned what could be done to prevent people from ever getting disease in the first place! Compounding this resentment, I would see my colleagues and professors guzzle soda and pound french fries in a seemingly defiant, ignorant manner. Again, I was embarrassed for them to be called health professionals.
2. I work for a pharmaceutical company and ironically believe drugs hold too much emphasis in the healthcare system. But unlike critics who brashly demonize the industry as an unethical entity, I understand its place in society and want to actively counter this misinformation.
With these insights I crafted the focus of The Healthy Pharmacist to ultimately inform health professionals of the real benefits of healthy behaviors and get them to become advocates for health, through their own lifestyle and professional practice. By targeting the health educators, patients will then become more informed and demand more a health-promoting environment, changing policy and regulations.
I believe in this trickle effect and in order for it to occur, I encourage these professionals to take a look at my study results and apply them to their own lives.
Health professionals need to practice what they preach.
The Healthy Pharmacist 
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