Curated News - Magazine - The Measured Man - The Atlantic
June 26, 2012
“Larry was beginning to have serious doubts about the way medicine is practiced in this country. “Here’s the way I look at it; the average American has something like two 20-minute visits a year with a doctor,” he explains. “So you have 40 minutes a year that that doctor is going to help you make good decisions. You have 500,000 minutes a year on your own, and every one of those, you are making decisions. So we’re already in a situation where you are in charge of your ship—your body—and you are making a lot of pretty horrible decisions, or else two-thirds of the United States’ citizens wouldn’t be overweight or obese. You wouldn’t have the CDC saying that 42 percent of Americans may be obese by 2030, and a third of all Americans may develop diabetes by 2050. That’s the result of a lot of bad decisions that people are individually making on their own.”
