What I'd never do by Britain's top female doctors
Go on a diet, ride a horse, have a health MoT...
With such an abundance of — often conflicting — information on how to live a longer life, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and, as a consequence, just to ignore the advice.
But when a group of the country’s leading female medics come together to share their golden health rules — the one thing they’ll never do — it’s time to pay attention.
Read on to learn how some of the country’s top experts look after their own wellbeing . . .
HAVE A HEALTH CHECK-UP OR ‘MOT’
Dr CLARE GERADA, former chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners and medical director of the Practitioner Health Programme. At MY age — i’m nudging 60 — i wouldn’t go searching for a disease lurking somewhere in the dark recesses of my body.
if it’s there, it will make itself known when it’s ready and then i will seek the necessary tests and treatments i need.
For example, i would never have a cholesterol test unless i develop a pre-existing problem such as diabetes or had a very strong family history of heart disease.
Despite what you read, routine use of statins in those with no risk factors (that is, healthy people without heart disease or diabetes) does not reduce overall risk of death from stroke or heart attacks — it just adds to the medicalisation of our lives.
Cholesterol is needed by our bodies and i have not seen any compelling evidence that means as a healthy woman i should be taking statins — just because of my age.
For many conditions i don’t buy into pre-emptive treatment or believe that the earlier you diagnose something the better the prognosis. Sometimes it just means you live with it longer.
TRUST THE ‘HARLEY STREET’ BRAND ALONE
GABRIEL WESTON, ear, nose and throat surgeon, author of the award-winning Direct Red: A Surgeon’s Story and a presenter of Trust Me, I’m A Doctor. PEOPLE often think that if they want to find a really good doctor, they need to go to harley Street.
But anybody can set up on harley Street and call themselves a consultant, even if they weren’t a consultant in the NhS.
All you need is to be able to pay the rent for your office and you can simply put your name over the door.
if i was going to seek medical treatment in the private sector, i would never choose a doctor who wasn’t running an NhS practice, too.
it’s so competitive — only the best get the NhS jobs. Seeing a consultant who is operating a private and NhS practice is an insurance system for yourself.
Often, doctors operating only in the private sector can be doctors who haven’t succeeded in the NhS. Yet everybody thinks that because they are ‘consulting’ on harley Street they are better than the rest.
But in reality, you have no real idea about their skill. it’s like a black market.
RIDE A HORSE, OR LET MY SON PLAY RUGBY
Dr LIZ COULTHARD, consultant senior lecturer in dementia neurology at the University of Bristol. thERE is really strong medical evidence that early onset dementia can be triggered by head injury.
We see many people in my dementia clinic with a previous head injury or small, sustained multiple injuries.
if you do sustain a head injury from riding, it can be neurologically devastating even beyond the dementia. We see horse riders with significant problems all the time. it’s for this reason i won’t let my daughter ride a horse.
With rugby and boxing, you sustain multiple small impacts and also the risk of one big impact to the brain.
there is emerging evidence that this can cause early onset dementia when — we think — that person might not have developed dementia at all without having sustained the injuries.
the neurological changes that happen after an injury are similar to some of the changes that accumulate in the brain to cause dementia.
there is also an argument this brings forward dementia that would have happened, but later in life without the knocks. But we still don’t know enough yet.
We know there are significant concerns that rugby might cause brain injury. While we know that rugby players who play the game at a high-level are likely to sustain these kinds of injuries, what we don’t know yet are the effects of childhood rugby.
Not letting my own child play a violent contact sport is my own personal view based on an assessment of the risks involved.
What i will be clear about is that for an injury to have any lasting neurological impact — like dementia, for instance — you would almost always need to have been knocked out.
the cognitive decline almost always follows what we call ‘a prolonged period of posttraumatic amnesia’.
in other words, if you hit your head but don’t pass out, you should be OK. But for me, putting