My brother, Kyle, and his wife came to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with Berk and I this year.

Kyle is an executive with the YMCA. It’s all he’s ever done. His first job out of college was to be a YMCA Aquatics Director and now, at almost 50 years old, he’s still with the Y and has steadily been promoted within the organization over almost 30 years.

In his role, Kyle gets to talk to many experts in the field of healthy lifestyles and exercise. When he was here last week he told me something that shouldn’t be a surprise to me at all, but still blew my mind given all the things we know about the human body and what makes it thrive.

Recently, he was in a panel discussion with a few people of different professional disciplines. One of them was a medical doctor and someone asked the MD a specific question:

“If you had a patient show up who was obese, had high blood pressure and degenerated cartilage of the knee, what would you do?”

The doctor replied by sharing 3 (possibly 4) different pharmaceutical drugs he would prescribe to the patient and also said he’d refer them to a surgeon for knee replacement surgery.

A panelist asked “would you talk to them about lifestyle changes or exercise as medicine?”

“No, I wouldn’t”

Crazy, right?

Unfortunately, not crazy. It’s easy to villainize this physician but it’s not his fault.

He’s behaving perfectly because that’s exactly how he was trained.

He doesn’t know any other way.

To make things worse, many of US are complicit in just unquestioningly doing exactly what our doctor tells us to do.

And it’s not our fault either.

It’s how most of us were raised. Little Sally is sick? Mom runs to the doctor and listens to him like he’s a god and dutifully accepts the prescription, gives Little Sally the pills, and does exactly as she’s told to do.

Little Sally cruises into adulthood and continues to do the exact same thing for herself and also for Baby Sally Junior in the next generation.

We blindly hand over all of our power.

But we don’t have to.

We can take responsibility for our own health. We can proactively learn how food and exercise are medicine and there are many, many ways to solve a problem.

Drugs and surgery can be a last resort, but they don’t have to be the first and only option.

So, here are my questions for you: Do you trust yourself as the ultimate empowered decision maker in your own health journey? Do you have a prominent seat at the table with your advisors when you need help?

If you don’t, why or why not?

I think it’s an important topic. To not mindlessly hand over our power to someone who spends 5-10 minutes with us once or twice a year.

The time to step into the Captain’s chair of your health may just be right now.