What if the answer to our health crisis isn’t a new program, a supplement, or a money-back guarantee?
What if it’s just the basics?
We live in a world of endless health information. Ads promising quick fixes, fad diets with celebrity endorsements, wellness programs that guarantee results or your money back. Everywhere you turn, someone is selling you a shortcut to health. And yet, as a country, we are sicker than ever.
I’ve seen it up close. Five years as a bedside nurse, and countless more in long-term care, will do that to you.
What I saw at the bedside
I can’t count the number of patients I cared for who were in their fifties or sixties but looked decades older. Every morning I’d walk in with a medicine cup overflowing with pills: one for blood pressure, one for diabetes, one for cholesterol, one for the side effects of the others. Chronic conditions stacked on chronic conditions. Heart disease. Obesity. Type 2 diabetes. A body that had been neglected for years, now requiring a team of people just to maintain it.
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But here’s what I also saw. The patients who had taken care of themselves showed up differently, even in the hospital.
They advocated for themselves. They asked questions. They got up and walked without being reminded. They wanted to know their plan for the day and they participated in it. They took their health seriously even when they were sick, because that’s what people do when they’ve made health a habit.
The patients who hadn’t? It was as if entering the hospital meant handing over all responsibility for their own body. Reminders to walk. Coaching to attempt basic self-care. A passivity that was painful to witness, not out of judgment, but out of sadness for what had been lost.
The difference was clear as day. And it had nothing to do with money, access, or luck. It had to do with the basics.
The system isn’t helping
Here’s the harder conversation.
The United States spends more on health care per capita than almost any other country in the world, and yet we have one of the sickest populations among developed nations. That’s not an opinion. That’s a well-documented disconnect that nobody in power seems to know how to fix.
Do our primary care providers really have time to help patients go back to basics? Or are they seeing thirty patients a day, managing the reality that some people won’t change, and reaching for the prescription pad because it’s the only tool that fits a ten-minute appointment?
I’m not blaming providers. I’m blaming a system that incentivizes treatment over prevention, that puts a bandaid on a problem instead of addressing its root cause, and that is quietly running out of people to hold it together.
The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create this crisis. It exposed it, and accelerated it. It showed exactly how unprepared we were to care for our sickest populations, and it burned out the very workforce responsible for trying.
So what do we do?
We go back to basics.
Eat real food. Move your body. Sleep. Manage stress. Advocate for yourself at every doctor’s appointment. Ask what you can do, not just what you can take.
I know that sounds overly simple for a problem this complex. And I’m not dismissing the real barriers, such as access to care, food deserts, and socioeconomic inequality. Those are real and they matter.
But somewhere in the middle of all the noise, we’ve lost sight of the foundational things that have always mattered. The things that don’t require a prescription, a program, or a money-back guarantee.
Your body is the one system you’ll live in your entire life. It deserves the same basics you’d give anything else you want to last.
Start there.
Paula Eidler is a nurse.
