Many of us have encountered a healthcare professional who does not meet Michelangelo’s Vitruvian Man ideal dimensions. Maybe you have seen a surgeon on a lunch break eating fast food or a nurse taking a smoke break. It’s very easy, and actually a common response, for the average onlooker to be ashamed of such a healthcare worker and this unhealthy behavior, even though the average person may practice similar behaviors.

Healthcare workers are just people too, and after a 12 hour shift it’s easier to grab cooked food than it is to go grocery shopping and prepare a meal, even if it’s caloric and fat content is damaging. It may be easier to relieve daily stresses in a hospital setting with a few puffs of a cigarette than to exercise and blow off steam.  This raises a crucial dilemma for healthcare workers. Is it necessary for healthcare professionals to be fit and live a healthy lifestyle to be effective?

Why Health Workers’ Fitness Doesn’t Matter:

Science is based on fact, evidence-based study, and reliable, repeatable experiments. Say you are an overweight male, with blood work that shows you are at risk of developing diabetes. No matter if your primary care physician is a muscular individual or if he or she is similar in body shape to you; the advice to you to get more exercise, eat healthier, and lose some weight is ironclad.

A physically unfit health professional does not change the science behind health. A well-balanced diet and routine exercise has repeatedly been shown to improve health outcomes. If a healthcare worker chooses to prioritize his or her time to getting adequate sleep and relaxation rather than proper diet and exercise, it does not change the validity of his or her recommendation to the patient. Conversely, a physician that runs four times per week and follows a strict vegan diet is not more qualified because he or she is more fit.
Why You Should Make Healthy Life Decisions Anyways:

Despite everything previously stated, the general public isn’t educated in health like you are. They don’t go onto Pubmed and look up articles, they haven’t taken collegiate nutrition classes, and they don’t fully understand the human metabolism like you do. Average people understand that doctors and nurses have had extensive schooling in healthy behaviors, and look up to them as sorts of community role models.

A study comparing and contrasting trust in fit and obese physicians was published in Nature in 2013. In the study, 358 adults were randomly assigned into groups of a ‘normal weight physician’, ‘overweight physician’, and ‘obese physician’. The participants then answered a series of questions associated to their group assignment. The results concluded that trust in their physician was inversely proportional to their physician’s weight, even if they were physically unfit themselves.

This study confirms that healthcare workers are role models. They serve to evaluate and advise patients. Even though the fitness level of a healthcare worker doesn’t affect the patient’s situation, it affects their mental trust in your evaluation. So in order to be a more effective healthcare worker, it could be a wise decision to make healthier decisions yourself.

Some hospitals have begun incentivizing healthier employee behavior. Pittsburgh’s UPMC hospital system banned smoking on all of its premises back in 2007, and then in 2014 banned all of its employees from smoking during a shift, which are generally twelve hours long. Smokers usually struggle to go twelve hours without a cigarette, so UPMC essentially forced its employees to forgo smoking, forfeit employment with them, or to lie and smoke somewhere privately. Other hospital systems have introduced fitness benefits that reward employees for weight loss or high step counts.

It’s important to remember that even though you know diet and exercise is good for patients, in order to actually get them to make the change, you must partake too. Humans look to other humans for learned examples. As a healthcare professional, it is your job to model this healthy behavior.