Doctors put own health at risk?

Many doctors deny their health issues, an expert said.

NEWSDAY

MELVILLE, N.Y. — Every year at one of the largest meetings of physicians who specialize in the treatment of cancer, doctors can be seen puffing cigarettes during breaks.

While the sight might strike many as shocking, it is only a snapshot of a broader picture involving doctors and health issues. Doctors, as reluctant as they are to admit it, suffer from the same bad habits and serious health concerns as everyone else.

The difference between physicians and the populations they serve is that it might take them longer to acknowledge something is amiss.

Dr. Jeffrey Trilling, chief of family medicine at Stony Brook University Medical Center, said physicians can readily recognize health problems in others but find the task tougher when it comes to themselves. Cancer, heart attack, stroke, alcoholism, smoking, obesity and drug abuse affect physicians just as they affect professionals in other lines of work.

“Physicians are more aware — and afraid — of the cascade effect of medicine,” Trilling said. “That is, you order one test, it comes back equivocal and then you order another and it’s more invasive, more painful than the previous, and that may be equivocal as well.”

Common threads

Trilling added that much of what is known about the way physicians handle personal health issues is anecdotal. But he said there are often common threads that link one physician’s health story to another’s.

“There are a couple of interesting things,” Trilling said. “The first one is denial. And the other one is that physicians know too much. They know the symptoms that they’re having may be significant, and it’s just human nature to procrastinate and deny.”

The American Medical Association does not maintain statistics on the number of physicians who have chronic or life-threatening conditions. Most physicians confronting a health issue, Trilling said, seek the opinion of a colleague.

Doctors might lose sight of their own health because they are so focused on their patients, said Dr. Diana Fite, immediate past president of the Harris County Medical Society in Houston. She is a vocal advocate for doctors paying attention to their health concerns.

Fite, an emergency physician, has high blood pressure and was aware that it had reached a potentially life-threatening level: 200/120. Normal blood pressure is less than 120/80.

After a brief period of taking medication for her blood pressure, Fite stopped because the drugs caused swelling in her throat and loss of her voice.