🤧 Prescribing Exercise?
As one of my clients put it, "There's a business model in there somewhere."
Exercise could be the best medication
If we normalize it instead of normalizing GLP-1’s.
Newsletter Summary
A follow-up from my post, “😱 Could Gyms Put Doctors Out of Business?”
Why the UK outdoes us in health with “social prescribing”
What Nonprofits in the U.S. are doing to try and keep up
Social Prescribing
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how gyms are bringing metabolic panels in to help people with preventative care.
This is great but likely costly and comes with access barriers.
I highly encourage more people to get regular blood work, even when nothing is wrong with them, to better understand health.
But sometimes, doctors fall short of prescribing the right thing at the end of visits and lab work.
This is not necessarily the doctor’s fault.
It is a collective fault of the U.S. Healthcare system that operates on a “sick-care” model — people who are sick will need medication to cure them until they are sick again and need more medication.
This is counterproductive if we can’t figure out what makes us sick in the first place and prevent it from happening again.
Enter Social Prescribing.
The UK is Outdoing the U.S. in Health
Social prescription — referring patients to activities and social practices like dance classes, health coaches and personal trainers (like myself), or other non-medicative practices — has become popular in Britain.
The UK’s government has already enlisted as many as 1,000 “new link” workers on this front to get patients from doctors to these practitioners as quickly as possible.
According to the New York Times, their goal is 900,000 social prescriptions by the end of 2024.
The kicker here is that while the UK has seen modest enough success to try and scale this idea, the studies are small, and more research needs to be conducted on the types of social prescriptions that are most effective.
Still, growing evidence collected by the National Academy for Social Prescribing suggests that solutions exist for a wide range of demographics, fueling the need for a similar intervention in the Americas.
America, Get With The (Social) Program
The Times’ article mentions that up to 30 programs in the works here in the U.S. are currently trying to match Britain’s initiative.
Unfortunately, legal red tape (and medical/pharmacological biases) will slow this change.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to High Performance Health to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.