As a healthcare professional, it often feels like an uphill battle when your message goes against the grain. Unless you have “Dr.” in front of your name, people don’t listen. They hear you, but they don’t follow your advice.

A friend of mine is a naturopathic doctor (ND), and her husband is a medical doctor (MD). She’s noticed that when they’re in social settings, people will ask her husband all sorts of health-related questions but rarely direct any to her. There’s no doubt that MDs carry considerable clout over NDs, yet despite all the advancements in medicine, obesity and disease rates continue to rise. We need to re-examine our approach to healthcare—quickly—before things get worse. You can put a band-aid over a symptom only for so long; eventually, you need to address the cause.

Take cholesterol, for example. I think we’ve been looking at it the wrong way. I’ve written about this before (check out my article Challenge The Establishment), but how many people actually listen and act on the message? When someone has elevated cholesterol, the knee-jerk reaction in the medical community is often to prescribe a statin, and most patients happily comply. Why wouldn’t they? The drug is covered by their health plan, and taking a pill is far easier than making lifestyle changes. While statins may be necessary in some cases, such as familial hypercholesterolemia, I’m not convinced they’re needed for the majority of people.

Well, Jonny Bowden, PhD, and Stephen Sinatra, MD, shared a similar message on The Dr. Oz Show. As authors of The Great Cholesterol Myth, they challenged conventional wisdom about cholesterol and heart disease. With “Dr.” in front of their names, perhaps more people will listen!