There Are 3 Levels of Health Advice
And knowing which advice to follow to have the best health outcome.
Okay, there are really 4 levels of health advice and really the only thing that matters is which one you’re following because it directly affects your quality of life and your disease burden in the future.
Level 4 Advice - Most Common
This would be what people read online. Let’s call it social media. Juicing, cleanses, supplements, and home remedies for cellulitis. If you’re worked in the ER or Urgent Care (me!) then you’ll see a lot of unfortunate cases of bad outcomes from taking the wrong advice and not getting timely care.Level 3 Advice - Public Health Messages
These are great pieces of information but they are meant to address population health, not individual health. It’s usually something like: “Be sure to take or use or get tested for …” It encourages one intervention or prevention over another. It likely will be good advice for at least 50% of folks but not everyone.
Level 2 Advice - Clinical Protocols
This is the white papers published by the American Urologic Society, American Heart Association, ACOG, and many other clinical expert panels. They are far more detailed and individualized than public health advice, but they have a strong industry bias towards testing, treatment, and interventions. Otherwise, they have a much better individual applicability.
Level 1 Advice - Individualized Clinical Assessment
Nobody knows you better than your doctor or healthcare provider. We as doctors can’t be our own doctors because the bias is too strong and we often misdiagnose ourselves (me!). Individualized clinical advice only comes from me getting to know my patient really well and if and when they have a major health situation, I can step in and offer the kind of individualized advice that may even go against all lower-tier advice.
How Do You Make Your health decisions? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. How do you view advice from the different sources I mentioned?