Hitch, 50% adherence, fasting for chemotherapy

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Good evening, 66.1ers.

Was Dinah’s post last week awesome or what? Have heard from a number of you that you enjoyed hearing from her. Maybe there’s another in store for the future? Thanks, Dinah!

A few good conversations this week that felt worth sharing here today.

Patient told me earlier this week that he’d always wanted to go to Europe. Late 20s, friends were going, he was busy with work, Europe is expensive, didn’t go. 30s came, still busy, didn’t go. Fast forward 40 years, he’s 76, doesn’t have his health, doesn’t have the passport stamp, either. Not in the same way he did when he was 36, anyway. Could still go, maybe? But the friends he would’ve traveled with? Not sure all of them could join. You know what’s coming…

Anything you’re not doing that you should be? Not the guilty “should”. The stuff you’ll regret not doing a few decades from now? 

Speaking of Europe…

Friend called this week. He’s living abroad for a few more months, met a girl, might be the one, long distance might be in their future, what to do? Now, I’m no Hitch, and this is all easier said than done, but isn’t it the same thing you do with any sort of big decision? Collect the information you can in the time you have, make a decision at that point? If it’s good, find a way to keep going, if it’s not, don’t?

And don’t forget to have fun! If it blows up, make sure you have a good story to tell your friends. If it doesn’t blow up…isn’t that a good story, too?

Then I found the below post (maybe it found me?) on LinkedIn. Have talked with more cancer patients than I ever thought I would in the past 3 years, but not sure I ever heard of anyone dealing with side effects via fasting? I’ll leave the science of something like this to the experts in the room, but it made me wonder…

What would happen if you kept track of what makes you feel good and did more of it, whether your doctor told you to do it or you just stumbled upon it?

This led me to wonder how many patients actually do what their doctor (or even their favorite health app) tells them to do?

If they do, how many do everything their doctor tells them to? If they don’t, why? Is it because they don’t want to be healthy? Don’t trust their doctor? Too expensive? Something else? If it’s trust, what goes into that? How can trust be increased? Where does all this fit in the “do no harm” ethos that governs medicine?

Got a question? I’ll be here.