"Ornish earned his reputation with his work on the management of atherosclerosis with extremely low fat vegetarian diets. But like predecessor Nathan Pritikin, Ornish's recommendations are not suitable for most people. The few small studies claimed to prove the worth of his work have also been questioned on scientific grounds. Dr. Richard Pasternak, director of preventive cardiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, has said that "There's virtually no science" in them. Dr. Robert Eckel, Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver and chairman of the nutrition committee of the American Heart Association also expressed serious doubts, as did Dr. Frank Sacks, a nutrition professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Sacks, in trying to replicate Dr. Ornish's results with a grant from the NIH, found that it was difficult to recruit patients and few could stick with the program. Fortunately, Ornish's program has been superseded by more effective forms of managing elevated blood cholesterol and the discovery of other treatable risk factors.
Ornish began as a devotee of an Indian guru, Sri Swami Satchidananda. He became involved with the Swami after dropping out of Rice University in 1972 in a state of suicidal depression. It was apparently during this time that he formed his beliefs about the importance of a vegetarian diet with no added salt, sugar or fat and no caffeine combined with meditation, yoga and exercise.
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Hearing/gorski2.html
Rather than teaching doctors about nutrition, I think we’d be better served by teaching patients that you don’t go to a mechanic for advice on how to design a car, and you don’t go to a car designer to fix your flat tire.
Doctors have always been among the worst sources for information on nutrition and fitness, and the ones who did learn something in school are among the worst. Both fields are evolving rapidly, and a doctor repeating the information he learned 20 years ago will tell you to eat more grains, exercise at a moderate pace, avoid alcohol, etc — all things that newer research have shown to be wrong.
Nutrition and fitness are a form of technology, evolving just as quickly as your computer. Listening to a doctor repeat knowledge he learned in the 1980s is like buying a Commodore 64 when you need to get online.
I fight, so I’m injured a lot, which requires occasional visits to doctors. There is nothing worse than a doctor who tries to follow up a torn tendon with life advice (after the perennial advice of “rest”) that is clearly wrong. His job is to fix me, not coach me on a healthy lifestyle.
If you combine a doctor’s ignorance with most doctors’ learned arrogance, what you get is a recipe for a fountain of wrongness that spews bad knowledge into the society at large. That won’t change with a few courses. But it might if we could just deflate their societal status a little down to what they are: a body version of a car mechanic.
http://www.boldizar.com
— Boldizar
