Imagine that your daughter is preparing for a junior ski race. It’s five minutes before the start of the race. You want to give her some meaningful advice. Which one of these two messages are you going to use?
1. “Honey, remember to do XYZ – it will help you avoid losing!”
2. “Honey, remember to do XYZ – it will make you faster and you will have more fun!”
Austrian physician Dr. Franz Wiesbauer, writing to his fellow doctors in a Medcrunch article called Why Your Health Message Does Not Work, has asked this question many times in an informal little experiment. His results? (more…)
These days, I like to ask women in my heart health presentation audiences what they imagine I would have done had it been my daughter Larissa suffering the same heart attack symptoms that I’d been doing my best to ignore while on that cross-country flight from Ottawa.
A young woman went to her grandmother to talk about life and how things were so hard for her. It seemed that as one problem was solved, a new one that was even worse cropped up. She didn’t know how she was going to make it, and wanted to give up. She was tired of struggling.
So I showed up for a scheduled medical test at the hospital the other day. It was one of those particularly distasteful tests that involve a full day’s prep at home choking down a range of hideous chemical cocktails, consumption of which is designed to induce explosive liquid diarrhea that requires staying very, very close to a toilet all day long. The procedure itself on the following morning was right up there on the Creepy Disgusting Embarrassing Cringe Scale of medical experiences.
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