No doctor in Taiwan has ever done that for me. It’s always the same shit:
“Stop smoking and drinking!”
“Yeah, I wish I could, but I’m an addict. I’ve been doing it for 45 years!”
There’s no recommending therapy, at all. Bugger-all discussion about diet and nutrition.
Just “Stop smoking and drinking!” like that’s going to fucking work.
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For me, at least at veteran general hospital, is that the doctor will tell you to see a nutritionist who will tell you how to eat, what portions to eat, complete with fake foods around so you can get a feel for it. It also includes a fairly thick book that you are supposed to record what you ate and all that… but I seriously hate writing diaries or journaling.
So yea sorry they aren’t going to help you quit smoking or drinking, they’ll just tell you that you need to do it.
I bet they told ya to drink warm water too.
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Doctors are on top of their game in Taiwan. Next step: acupuncture and suction cups.
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It’s the same pretty much anywhere. The fact is that the average doctor doesn’t know what advice to give - they just don’t have any training for it. The same is true of nutritionists, except that they’ll drag the patient through some pointless ritual that achieves nothing except job security for the nutritionist. You might say, well, doctors should bloody well educate themselves, and some do. There are also an increasing number of diabetic specialists who have figured it out. But there are only so many hours in the day, and it takes a lot of time to figure out that the standard advice is disastrously wrong.
My observation so far is that there is a component to obese/diabetic eating patterns that looks a lot like physical dependency (because it is). The difference between food “addiction” and drug addiction is that the psychological dependency is fairly weak. If you can get someone eating properly for two weeks the physiological component is broken, and it takes about six months for the psychological dependency to go away. Unlike with alcohol or cigarettes, a single “relapse” event won’t unravel the whole thing - in fact once the problem is fixed, they can enjoy pizza and icecream or whatever and it will do them no harm at all, because their appetite will not demand that they eat the whole pizza, or a pint of icecream.
The difficult part is that most obese/diabetic people literally have to hit rock bottom before they can be convinced to start eating properly again. It’s not unlike drinking. I know one fat person who is 100% aware that she’s going to die of metabolic disease, but she refuses flat-out to do anything about it.
This is one of the arguments for a universal basic income. When people are primarily concerned about job security and not actually doing their job well, there will be incredible amount of waste out there that isn’t actually working. Yeah one of the byproducts of doing your job really well is that your job security is going to go away, because you would finish the job and be out of a job shortly. As a result there’s a huge amount of waste especially in government, as you have a payer who has money and is willing to spend it, and a bunch of hungry people who is bound to do as little as possible for the maximum amount of pay. With a universal basic income, people can just stop worrying about job security and devote their time to doing their job because they love to, but that would not only take a huge amount of automation to ensure that all of our basic needs are taken care of regardless of work, but that we stop thinking ourselves as vulnerable individual living in a jungle. It would require us to basically have the same mind as hive minded species like ants and bees. Obviously that would never happen and it would be a complete affront to individualist societies like the West.
I was actually going to recommend reciting Buddhist scriptures as the following step out of these traps of desire . . .
If however someone tells me to stop eating Indian food, then the kid gloves come off!
Guy
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