What if I told you that there was a medicine freely available, which would reduce your chances of getting a range of cancers, reduce your risk of stroke, type 2 diabetes, lower your chances of a heart attack, reduce your chances of developing brittle bones, improve your blood pressure and improve your mood? All with no known side effects and at a minimal cost? Well, I think most people would be queuing up outside our door if we were selling that pill and I would be flying around the world in my private jet!!

The truth is though that there is such a miracle cure and it’s been around and known about for a very long time: its called EXERCISE!!!! Now, I can almost hear people groaning at this point. Some people will be saying that is ridiculous, exercise is not a medicine and also if it could do all those things why is everybody not exercising??

Well, in answer to those two points: I guess it depends on what you think of as medicine. If you count something that reduces your risk of getting an illness or improves your chances of recovering from an illness then exercise clearly counts as a medicine. If you only think of medicine as something that is done to you or that you take as a pill then it probably doesn’t look like medicine but if you think that it is the effects that are important and not the form of the medicine then I would argue that exercise most certainly is a medicine. I would also argue that we as a society have too long relied upon “medicines” to treat us when things have gone wrong e.g. we have gained a lot of weight and now have type 2 diabetes, low back pain, painful knees, depression, reduced mobility and are having to take a cocktail of expensive drugs to keep all of these things in check. Surely this really doesn’t make sense when most of these issues are very much preventable by doing the right things in the first place. Prevention really is the best treatment and in my mind is where healthcare should be focused.

To the last point: that if exercise really could do all of those things why is everyone not exercising? After all, no one wants to have an increased risk of having a stroke and being severely disabled as a result. Well, that is really two questions: firstly can exercise really lower your risk of cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, stroke, all causes mortality, type 2 diabetes? Simply put and without going to a lot of trouble quoting study after study and review after review, the answer is yes. Unequivocably and undeniably yes!! Government guidelines and huge numbers of studies are extremely clear about this: exercise really does work. To me this is one of those topics where there really isn’t another side to the argument, the evidence is unequivocal: exercise does all the things I have stated and more. You don’t even need to do a lot each week to get a benefit: approximately 2.5hrs per week of moderate intensity exercise gets you all of the above benefits and if you choose to eat healthily you get even more!!! I try generally to be even handed and look at all sides of an argument but in this case there really is a large body of scientific evidence that says that exercising each week will keep us fit and healthy and reduce our chances of a lot of unpleasant diseases.

The last part to the question is much more difficult to answer and is a societal conundrum. After all if we know that exercise and a healthy lifestyle will reduce our chances of dying young from a range of unpleasant causes, why doesn’t everyone exercise?? Truthfully I have no great answer to this but personally I believe that we have for too long as a society looked to be treated for illnesses rather than looking for ways of preventing them. Certainly if we looked at the set up of the NHS, it is very much set up as a treatment system rather than a prevention system. This is completely understandable when we look back at how and when it was set up. When the NHS was set up, virtually no one was obese and people were in general very active (few people drove a car for example). The diseases of poor health such as type 2 diabetes, heart failure, high blood pressure and stroke were nowhere near the problems that they are nowadays. People back then needed treatment when things went wrong. Now, I would argue it is the opposite case: people need help to prevent these diseases rather than treatment when they have them…

 

Okay, I think that is enough of a rant for one physiotherapist. However I suspect that this is a topic that I will be returning to in a later blog…