Exercise Is Medicine
Why Doctors Should Prescribe Diet and Exercise
‘If it was a pill, exercise would be a trillion-dollar moneymaker prescribed to everyone’
This story is part of Exercise Is Medicine, a special report from Elemental that covers the incredible healing benefits of exercise, why doctors are prescribing workouts, the science of exercise for depression, and expert-designed exercises anyone can do.
One night back in 1978, as a medical student at George Washington University Hospital, Dr. Neal Barnard was changing the IV for a woman with Type 2 diabetes who’d been told her foot would have to be amputated. She grumbled to him about the misery of her hospital stay and ultimately refused the amputation, leaving the hospital with her foot intact. Only later did Barnard realize just how wrong he and the rest of the woman’s clinical team had been.
“Although the roots of Type 2 diabetes are in the everyday food choices that lead to obesity and insulin resistance, we were ready to amputate but never started a discussion about improving her diet,” wrote Barnard, who is now president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, in a commentary last summer in JAMA Internal Medicine.
