Dipping into the crevice of social media, the pit of useful and useless information is becoming a minefield of confusion for those seeking credible tips and recommendations in the health, fitness and wellness industry.
There has been a recent social and societal outcry of questions and concerns surrounding the legitimacy of certain wellness ‘gurus’ and industry ‘experts’, and a demand for trust worthy, positive forces to step forward, take action and drown out the pseudoscience con artists.
The New York Times, recently published an article that went viral titled “Wellness Industrial Complex” as well as The Sunday Times and Well to do London pointing the metaphorical finger at the false idols of wellness.
So who can you trust in this vast mine-field of opinions? Our Chief Medical Doctor Jack Kreindler lays it down.
“A great question indeed. Who to Trust?
It all boils down to results. Repeatable results. Improved outcomes that are measurable and meaningful. We can be hopeful of course of the next new thing but the anecdotes of true leading lights or guesswork gurus, however right they may fortuitously turn out to be, must be backed up by data, and lots of it. Data that can be traced back to source, data that we can all view and scrutinise, with simple visualisation tools that a wide number of wise people can help us interpret. Therein lies the future of the medical consultation – the ability for us all to be our own data-geeks without the need for maths degrees. But first we must change our mindset. We must become more positive as a medical profession about huge amounts of real world patient generated data combined with open access to data from clinical trials, and we must become more positive about our own ability to examine and track what we test against how we feel, how we perform, how much we weight, how well we’ve slept, how likely we are to get cancer or Alzhielmers even using reliable bio markers.
So, who to trust? It’s intelligent, empowered communities of people and patients growing data and showing real outcomes from the the most scientifically sound devices and data-sets. It’s actually ourselves.”
So the next time someone advises you who you should turn to for the best advice in the health, fitness and medical world, take a long hard look in the mirror and try yourself for a change.