BENGALURU: Over the last half-century, India has made much progress with its health system, tackling seemingly insurmountable challenges with success. From the drive to inoculate the entirety of the population against some of the most dangerous diseases like polio and more recently against Covid-19, to improving the rates of infant mortality...all of these have contributed to an unprecedented improvement in the citizens’ average lifespans.
Yet, the country still faces a tough challenge when it comes to chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes. With increasing urbanisation, risk factors for such diseases are likely to worsen much further. Currently, around 9 per cent of the country’s population has been diagnosed with diabetes. City-based medical practitioner Dr Mythri Shankar is one of them.
But unlike most people diagnosed with diabetes, Shankar, who has over 25 years of experience as an MD in nuclear medicine, chose a radical approach to combat her disease. In a recent book titled Ease: How to lose weight, heal, prevent, and reverse disease, she chronicles her journey and hopes that it can serve as a companion to others diagnosed with chronic diseases.
An unwillingness to take medications with unpleasant side effects for the rest of her life is what led her on that journey. “When I researched a bit more, I discovered a board-certified MD programme called Lifestyle Medicine, which looks at an alternate approach to treating chronic diseases,” she shares adding, “As it turns out, so much can be done through Lifestyle Medicine to alleviate chronic diseases, even though much of it isn’t practised in mainstream medicine. Some of the adverse lifestyle choices we make in our 20s and 30s tend to accumulate and turn into chronic diseases later in life.”
While focusing on healthier choices early on can greatly reduce the risk of chronic diseases, Shankar stresses that choices one make post diagnosis can also help them effectively combat chronic diseases. “Healthy lifestyle choices can help bring down certain parameters back to normal, essentially reversing the damage,” she shares. “When I was diagnosed, my haemoglobin A1c levels were at 7.8, which is really high, and the consensus is, at that rate, you need to take medication. But I managed to bring it down to 5.5 without medications, solely through changes to my lifestyle. Some of the doctors were astonished at my progress and were curious to know how I achieved it. Having to explain to each of them became quite repetitive. That’s what prompted me to write this book.”
Furthermore, a lack of concise information based on proven research that can serve as an alternative to mainstream medicine was also a factor in Shankar’s motivation behind writing the book. “There are many out there, who are trying to do the right thing, but with inadequate and often inaccurate information. So, I felt that somebody needs to put out the latest and the most accurate information for people to easily access,” she concludes.