Dr. Bob Arnot Show Segment
Dr. Bob Arnot, CBS Medical Correspondent (NBC) Given: May 23, 1996 at the AARP Biennial Convention - Denver, Colorado
Personal Responsibility & Health Care Health Issues
“Learn how to take charge of your health and help prevent illness through proper nutrition, stress management and good fitness.”
PRESENTATION (partial) ... some kind of a bid that is, number one, want to be an optimist, number two, you want to be smart, number three, you want to pump iron, number four, you want to play aerobic sports, number five, you want to eat young. To pull all that together, the last thing you want is a list and the reason is lists make us crazy. In our left brain, that list ticks away and we go, "Arnot said I got to run out and get some soluble fiber. I've got to lift weights. I've got to go and get my roller blades, I've got to get my....." I mean just crazy. What you want to do is use the right part of your brain to motivate yourself. To form in that right part of your brain, an energy. The best way to form that energy is to take a picture of yourself that's 30 years old, hopefully you looked good thirty years ago and say, "That's what I want to look like. I'm going to be that age." Now if it sounds like nonsense, I have spent part of the year before last with Arnold Shwartzenager going on his tour of schools around America trying to motivate kids to be in physical fitness program. One evening in his home in Los Angeles, I said to Arnold, "How is it you've become the success that you have?" He said, "Bob, I always dreamed." and before I got to say anything his brother-in-law said, "Yeah Arnold, you know, you're always sleeping or nodding off." and Arnold goes, "Yes, but I'm worth two hundred million dollars more than you are." Great put-down for in-laws at Thanksgiving dinner. So he went on to describe how when he was a youth in Austria, just 14 or 15, he dreamed of becoming the best bodybuilder in the world. Doing exercises, he didn't have a little sort of cheat sheet saying, got to do this, got to do that, he just had a single image of Arnold Schwartzanger this great big bodybuilder and he became the most successful body builder in the world. He was Mr. Olympia at least seven different times. He dreamed of coming to America, dreamed of making millions of dollars, dreamed of marrying into a famous political family, and now some say, dreams of becoming Governor of California. The interesting point is that people who come here from other countries, because they're not sort of weighed down by what other people think about them, they get these dreams and they just do them and they become reality. So in terms of the reality becoming younger or becoming young throughout your old age, you need to create that kind of vision. You take as an example someone like Bill Gates, the world's most successful and rich businessman. You can imagine that when he was 15 or 16, that he had trouser pant legs up to here, holes in his stockings, coke bottle lenses, just enough Clearasil to cover half the pimples on his face, a plastic pen protector here with ink dripping down the middle of his shirt and people could have and probably did, consider him a geek or a nerd. But because he had an image of himself as smart, bright, and a real innovator, he was able to invent this dream which is becoming the worlds most successful .... Now we face a real problem in America. The last great “ism” is ageism. That is, all of the discrimination are sort of sharply jumped upon oppressed. You call somebody a particular name because of their ethnic group or because of .....that they have, you will suffer the consequences very rapidly. But it is all right for some reason or other because of somebody's age, they think a certain thing about them or to treat them a certain way. The reason I bring up this Bill Gates principle is that if you feel people think that you are slowing down or you are old, you need to just think back to creating this image. You want to create an image that is your image, not an image of what society puts on you, not an image of what other people think about you, but what you want to think about yourself. And by creating that image, you can drive yourself every day to pick up that Titanium, twin disk, bright, dual suspension mountain bike, go out to the gym and pump iron, change your diet. Change for those few of you who may not get the optimist in this room so that you can live young at a very , very old age. Now in closing, before I take questions, my father is someone who always had a great vision. He had dreamed of going to Harvard Medical School even though he was born out in the plains of Montana and had no money and no transportation to get there put himself on a cattle car to Chicago in the stockyards and then a freight train to Boston and talked his way into Harvard and graduated from there. Earlier though, he, in high school had wanted to be a Train Station Master so he could get a pass to get out to see the great west, to get out to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. To do that though was a very rigorous examination because of the tremendous responsibility put on these Station Masters. So one Saturday morning after two months of hard studying, he came down to the grumpy, old, examiner there, the Montana State Railways came by and gave him a quiz. He said, "Look it, you have two trains doing 90 miles an hour aimed right at each other. They're on a single track in the Empire Builder westbound and eastbound aimed right like that. They're going to smash into each other and there's going to be a terrible train accident unless you can stop it. What are you going to do?" He said, "Well, first of all what I'm going to do is I'm going to put up a red, red signal on it." He said, "Well good thinking but the last train has passed, where the signal light is, it's too late." And he said, "I guess what I'd do is I'd put up a red flag like this and wave it up and down." He said, "You could do that, but it's night." And he said, "What else I would do is I'd set the whole series of flares in the Boston sky." He said, "Well, you could set out those flares but if you do, you'll find there's a 20 foot ceiling in driving hail, sleet, and rain, they won't see it." Then he said, "I guess what I'd do is I'd turn one of the trains onto an emergency track." He said, "You could do that but at 90 miles an hour, that train would roll over onto its back, the other train will hit it anyway and there are toxic waste products in the back that would explode killing 200, killing people for a 200 mile radius around with the toxic waste products and make Al Gore mad as Hell when he becomes Vice President." So finally my father wipes his forehead and says, "Well sir, what I'd do is I'd ask you for a dime." "OK, fine, here it is. What are you going to do with it?" He says, "I'm going to go over to that phone booth there and I'm going to call my mother." He says, "What are you going to do a fool thing like that for?" He says, "Sir, I'm going to tell her to drive on down here in a big hurry to see the biggest train wreck she's ever seen." So in closing, if you don't want to be a train wreck, if you don't want to follow the motto of the 1950's which was die young, die hard and be the prettiest in the cemetery, pay attention to Doctor Bob Smith. Don't wait for anymore red flags, flares, or signal crossings, remember that the motto of the 1990's and beyond is to die young all right as old as you possibly can. Thank you very much.
Dr. Bob Arnot, CBS Medical Correspondent (NBC)
Given: May 23, 1996 at the AARP Biennial Convention - Denver, Colorado
Personal Responsibility & Health Care Health Issues
“Learn how to take charge of your health and help prevent illness through proper nutrition, stress management and good fitness.”
Q: Dr. Arnot, tell me what made the decision with medicine versus broadcasting?
A: Well it was a decision made for me. I was having a great time running the Sports Medicine Lab for the different Olympic Teams up in Lake Placid, and someone looked at a tape that was done during the Olympics and said, "You belong in broadcasting." but.....
Q: Was it a minor in school or anything like that? Did you do....
A: You know, it's embarrassing. I didn't even own a television set when they approached me. I used to work from 6 A.M. until 2 A.M.. I would work 72 hour shifts in the Emergency Room over the weekend and I would do Sports medicine all week long. But what I really did though in Sports Medicine with both patients who had Heart Disease or Lung Disease and with Olympic Athletes, was to spend all my time trying to explain things to them and so the great thing about television was it gave you all of these different tools. You had graphics, you had access to the best medical experts, you have the possibility of telling stories in a much different way. So I really see this very much the same career it's just you have much better tools and a much bigger audience.
Q: We are all familiar with Chicago Hope and ER and we see much in the Emergencies. Are we, are we seeing the real thing?
A: Well in ER it certainly looks like a real thing to me. I had long proposed the idea that you do some kind of a true emergency show and you'd always hear back from people who in television say it would it would be too complicated or you couldn't explain it in technical terms. But the beauty of ER and Chicago Hope too is that they can throw around the terms, you can be thrown into these situations and because of the context, you'd get it and that there's no situation that is more true to life that's greater drama that you find then the life and death of an Emergency Room. I mean, with the way that we cover news where you're in different war zones and the famines and what not, there's still nothing to capture the drama of a big city Emergency Room.
Q: You did a great piece a couple of weeks ago on tainted blood and you were just talking to me as we were setting up our cameras about tainted tissue, that evidently is a real big thing. A: There's a real concern now that we don't want regulation in terms of medicine .....it as safe as it possibly can be.
Q: Why does the FDA take so long to clear some of these new medicines that are coming out and the Europeans seem to get it out in their market so much faster?
A: Well the FDA response would be, they get it on and off their market a lot faster. You look in France as an example and they'll have drugs, they might have two or three times the drugs that we have approved but they get on, they have some adverse reaction, and they come off. I think the real reason is .... When you look back at the terrible tragedy these kids with these, they call the flipper arms and legs that the FDA really feels that they're trying to protect the public against these kinds of problems. We've seen too, in terms of Heart Disease that a very very popular drug for irregular heart rhythms turned out to actually kill people. So there is that balance between the public safety and wanting to get the newest, latest drugs out there. I think it's a matter of category. When you're dealing with Cancer drugs there's a long advocate of getting those drugs out early, letting people in hopeless situations try those rather than being driven to Mexico to try Laetrile as an example and, in fact, the President did, about a month or so ago, change the FDA on this so that they will be using drugs that are experimental far earlier, you'll have access to them, and I think that's very much the right way to go. The real criticism I think that's valid if, for instance, drugs that are being used for asthma that have been used for 20 or 25 years in a place like England. There's a long track record where we just wait too long or with cardiovascular medicine, it's now said that we're two years behind Europe in terms of our Cardiovascular Medicine. You're going to have an angioplasty catheter go into your heart to open up a blockage, you can get that done far better in Italy than you can at...... For some, the blockage is because they have better equipment, they have equipment..........but we do have these different kinds of ....costs. But only technology.....FDA's suggestions.....
Q: I had a co-worker who had a bout with Cancer and in seeing his doctor last week, he asked the doctor, he said, "Do you really think that this will be licked in my lifetime." The doctor, without hesitation, said, "Yes, and Heart Disease too." Your comments.
A: When I was doing Diabetes research back in 1972, this poor fellow resident had Diabetes, came out of the blue and one of the doctors said, "Don't worry about it. Within a year or two, we're going to have a cure." Now it's 20 years later and there's still not a cure. So I don't don't it. We have now the basic science to be able to cure Cancer and cure Heart Disease. The practicality of making medicines that are safe without the side effects could be 5 years, could be 50 years, we really don't know when that's going to happen. The important thing to say though, is that we hold the basic science.....it's one of the tragic .....where with tremendous drop in national funding......a tremendous drop in terms of medical faculty funded research that those plans are likely not to reach fruition because we don't have the money .....to make that run political lining come up with much better treatment or even cure for diseases, they need to be pushed off as long as 15 years .........
Q: I think it was this morning or yesterday morning.....talked on the morning show and I think they came up with a figure of that the 85 year old plus is the largest growing population in the United States. What does that mean for you in medicine and other doctors?
A: The wonderful, great news is that if you hit 65 in the United States and you're healthy, you have the longest life expectancy of anybody on the face of the planet and that's an amazing statistic. We think it was the Soviet.....of the ..... So we have a tremendous potential but the importance is to be able to live young for those years and that's where you get the very low.....you've got the weight training, terrific diet, right kinds of aerobic exercising and keeping yourself mentally fit and ..... There has been this .....as you get older, you are more......that we kind of lose it.....and when you look at the statistics, the majority of people over the age of 65 or 75 actually are ....up and around, they feel good, they're leading lives and like my parents in their 80's, they're really living their lives as if they were in their 40's. Now, .....catastrophic in terms of our kids because they're going to have to pay for our, our medical bills but the hope is that those medical bills may decline if we are eating right and .....right kind of exercise program ......there is a complete shift in paradox.....old age is a time of .....old age is a time when you have a chance to have a true second youth.
Q: Old age seems to be pretty much up here but there are people here at the convention, I'm sure you saw them in your audience, they can be 50, they can be 80, they were all very interested in what you had to say about the....getting up and exercising, pumping iron and terms and things that I'm sure 25 years ago......But you seem to be on the right track. Are you getting acceptance......
A: People really want a vision of some kind of radical change, believe it or not. I think that we've had terrible message which is tiny little bits of moderate change....his diet would say, well he once said, "You have to eat a vegetarian diet rather than ......because they have this.....immediate change in their health." And so when you advise that a 75 year old get a mountain bike, they think for a moment, "Gee, this guy's a little wacko and then they get it and they find that, "Wow it's so much more interesting than power walking at the mall." So........and sort laid up. Should exercise, you should have the right kinds of food, very dull kind of message. The Harvard School of Public now is undertaking.....they've gone to the rap music. They've gone to prime time television sitcoms as a way of motivating people by taking an exciting approach. My approach is by taking something that's exciting and interesting and fun, you're going to want to love to do rather than applying the ....darkness practice.
Q: Thank you very much......
A: Great pleasure. I look forward to my next mountain bike vacation in Santa Barbara.
