John M. Tew, Jr., MD, a Mayfield Clinic neurosurgeon and Great Living Cincinnatian, issued a call to action to health care providers Thursday night in his keynote address at the Cincinnati Business Courier’s Health Care Heroes Awards banquet at the Hyatt Regency.
He challenged health providers to “model the behavior that projects or predicts a forever-healthy life” and to be “agents for change,” just as health care providers were models for reducing the rate of tobacco use in the United States decades ago.
“We can’t expect other people to adopt healthy behavior if we don’t model it and teach it and prescribe it ourselves,” he said. “It’s not acceptable to just prescribe medications for disease; we also need to prescribe practices for health and wellness.”
Dr. Tew spoke as one who has himself modeled the three most important principles of good health:
- Shun tobacco
- Eat a plant-based diet
- Exercise regularly
In avoiding tobacco, he is joined by the vast majority of physicians. He noted that today, 50 years after the Surgeon General’s first warning about the dangers of tobacco use, only 2 percent of physicians smoke. Work remains to be done, however, in modeling the areas of nutrition and exercise.
While preparing for his address, Dr. Tew observed that his own lifestyle transformation during his 50 years in medicine was gradual, as opposed to an abrupt, all-or-nothing change.
“The concept of what is healthy – or our interpretation of what is healthy — changes every day, so I have changed as I study and try to assimilate best practices,” he said. “When I was a teenager, I probably had the worst practices of any time in my life, as I wasn’t aware of the nature of poor nutrition. I didn’t understand the concept.”
Gradual change “is what we would expect – or hope — for most people,” he added.
Abrupt changes may in fact be unwise, he said, because of the nature of modern medical reporting in the news media and blogs. Stories that tout the latest study about vitamins, anti-oxidants, or minerals and are based on limited research have the potential to confuse rather than enlighten. They may even be refuted by the next study.
Dr. Tew, a Professor of Neurosurgery, Radiology and Surgery at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, first learned about the concept of longevity as a medical student at Wake Forest University. “There are certain cultures, called blue zones, where people live a long time,” he said. “I found it fascinating. I started studying people who had long lives and trying to emulate what they did.”
As a squash player and runner in his younger days and later as a cyclist and fitness enthusiast, Dr. Tew has long embraced exercise as a vehicle for physical health and brain health as well as for building strong muscles, bones, and joints.
More recently, Dr. Tew was deeply affected by The China Study, a comprehensive, epidemiological volume about nutrition research and the links between animal- and plant-based diets and disease. The China Study draws its title from landmark research involving hundreds of thousands of Chinese living in 65 different counties over a period of 20 years.
“The China Study helped me to understand the role of nutrition not only in the prevention of heart disease, but in the reversal of heart disease and in the prevention of cancer and other chronic diseases,” he said.
Dr. Tew’s call to action is part of a movement he said is well under way. “Its time has come. That’s why people like me — and you — need to put our model on the line,” he said. “And we have to teach it, model it, and prescribe it, and encourage all the other leaders of industry and community to buy in. Because just trying to teach it to 5-year-olds won’t work. We need to get our leaders to buy into this and put some teeth into it, as was done with the tobacco story.”
For anyone whose mouth waters at the mere thought of potato chips, French fries, or a bacon cheeseburger, modeling the new behaviors will involve some sacrifice. For Dr. Tew, that means his wife’s delicious “Susie Burgers” are a recipe of the past, replaced with whole grains, fruits, vegetables, beans, rice, and nuts.
Asked whether he had any vices remaining, Dr. Tew laughed. “I have lots of vices left, but I’m not going to say what they are. I don’t want to model them.”
— Cindy Starr