LIFE UPSTREAM

There’s an old parable about a professor and his medical student walking together along a river. As they walk, they discover a drowning man. The student immediately jumps in to save him. Farther along, a woman is drowning. Again, the student jumps in while the professor stands and watches. They continue walking, and encounter two more people drowning in the river. Once again, the student dives in to save the two, and barely survives with her own life. The professor just continues walking along the river. Exhausted and infuriated, the student confronts her professor. “Why didn’t you help me? Those people were dying, and I barely made it out alive!”  The professor just keeps walking and says, “I’m going upstream to see why all these people are falling in the river.” Soon enough, the professor and student come across a bridge with a hole in it. Person after person are slipping through the hole and falling into the river. The professor and the student get to quick work repairing the bridge.

Much like the medical professor in the story, I decided a while back that I wanted to confront people’s medical problems upstream. After years as a cardiac surgeon, I became tired of bypassing many of the long standing medical issues in my patients that result from years of poor health and poor lifestyle choices.

In our mid to late twenties almost everyone is at their peak of health and performance, however, at some point between 30 and 50, life begins to catch up with us. Our health starts to decline. Some of this decline is a factor of age, but in most adults health begins to dip as a function of stress at work, family obligations, and the challenges of life that make us too busy to care about our long term state of wellbeing. The problem is, if we don’t put in the time and effort to maintain good health as we get older, we are at risk of ending up way downstream where it’s too late to get effective treatment. 

It is highly unlikely for anyone to go through their entire life without experiencing a major setback or needing some kind of major medical treatment. A good example is open-heart surgery. It takes an incredible toll on even the healthiest of patients. It will wipe out a teenager for weeks. A 65 year old will be under the weather for up to 6 months or more after such an invasive procedure, especially when they haven’t been taking care of themself for the last 30 years. Even worse yet, some patients have become too high risk to undergo surgery because of decades of poor lifestyle choices and we must resort to other, less-effective and often compromising treatments. 

Life is a marathon, do you want to run it cold or do you want to train for it? Everyone has the opportunity to change their long term health trajectory. The choices we make upstream in the decades following our 20’s determine whether we stay fit and maintain a high level of health and happiness and if we can successfully face life’s most difficult challenges as we age. Or alternatively, we end up downstream in a world of hurt, as a high-risk patient for most medical procedures and continually self-inflicting medical issues and sadness upon ourselves as a result of bad living. 

My goal in starting Park City Performance Medicine was simply to treat patients upstream, and show everyone how to change the trajectory of their lives early, before it’s too late.