Don't ignore the advice

A former student of mine at MCC who became a very good friend died unexpectedly at home earlier this week. He was an avid runner and bicyclist, competing in many races and events in Nebraska and surrounding territories but his heart gave out on him. He was only 62 and had lots of life left to live. Although we never talked about it, I would think the last thing on his mind was the possibility of dying from heart failure because he was so committed to living a healthy lifestyle and staying in shape.

This reminded me once again of the man who literally became the guru of running in America, Jim Fixx. Fixx was an obese, two packs of cigarettes a day smoker when he decided to take charge of his life and adopt healthy habits because he knew the road he was on would eventually kill him. So he started running, quit smoking and literally convinced thousands and thousands of people across the world to do it too, thanks to his best-selling book. Then on July 20, 1984, at the young age of 52, Fixx suffered a fatal heart attack after his daily run.

The nation of runners was stunned because the logic at the time was that people who were in excellent health, good shape and maintained healthy life styles literally couldn’t have heart attacks and die. But they were wrong because an autopsy proved that what was going on INSIDE Jim Fixx’s body was totally different from the way Fixx looked on the outside. The doctors found that the three main arteries leading to his heart were almost completely blocked with plaque and the autopsy also showed he had had at least three heart attacks weeks before the one that killed him. How could that have happened to such a healthy person?

He had a significant family history of heart disease plus the damage done to his body during his unhealthy days had not been repaired with his new healthy lifestyle. In other words, it was heredity rather than life style that killed Jim Fixx.

Some months ago, Time magazine published a stunning full feature on the fact that many of life’s toxic and fatal maladies are due to bad luck rather than what we eat, how much we exercise or the healthy lifestyle we live. We either have bad genes in us or we don’t and if we don’t, unhealthy life styles are unlikely to kill us. If we do, they most certainly will regardless of what we do to try and lessen that possibility.

For every medicine sold to the general public, and we’re certainly inundated with more prescription information today than ever before, pharmaceutical companies are required by law to advise potential patients about the possible negative side effects of taking the drug and the most extreme side effect is very often death. These side effects are mentioned because they happened to some people taking the drug although not all or even most, so we tend to ignore the scary advice because we want the benefits of the medicine. For example, I’ve never experienced any negative side effects from ANY drug I’ve ever been prescribed but that doesn’t mean I won’t in the future. And it certainly doesn’t mean that other people haven’t. Some people suffer these side effects. Some people die from them although nobody thinks they will. If a drug has a 90% survival rate, that means we have only one chance in 10 of dying from the drug. But what we fail to realize or really even take into consideration is that, on average one person out of ten WILL die from taking that drug. We never think it’s going to be us or that it’s always going to be somebody else and, if you’re lucky, you’re right. But now we’ve gone from faith in medicine to hoping we have luck which isn’t any better than flipping a coin.

Doctors are perceived to be the saviors of the world and the gurus of everything medicinal but often times they don’t know. And because of that, sometimes they misdiagnose, perform unneeded surgeries, prescribe inappropriate medicines and many other things that lead to unhealthy bodies instead of healthy ones. Most obviously don’t do it on purpose; they believe they’re acting in the patient’s best interest when they do one of these things but the truth is the patient suffers needlessly because of the health care system’s mistakes.

Some of you may be wondering what the positive advice of this column is and the answer is there isn’t any. Life is a crapshoot. No one knows when they’re going to die or how. Medicines don’t cure everything. Doctors don’t cure everyone. The best medical advice is sometimes wrong. Even when we do everything we’re supposed to do and live the healthiest lifestyle possible, we still die.

Because the only certainty of life is its uncertainty.