Cut down on the sweets. Eat more vegetables. Get more exercise. This is the advice given to patients time and time again to reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, and many other diseases. Although pharmacists and student pharmacists are instructed to recommend lifestyle interventions as the first line of treatment, how many follow these same recommendations by living a healthier life themselves?

 

You are a future health care professional and as such, should embody its meaning and express it through how you live your life. In school, you are taught to be the positive image of pharmacy, with or without the white coat. What happens to this image when health professionals repeatedly dine at the local food joint with a tall soda, burger, and fries, or fill their shopping basket with preservative-laden, processed foods? Patients view pharmacists as role models for healthy living. As a result, unhealthy actions like these may send the wrong message, causing them to think instead, “My pharmacist does it, so it must not be that bad!”

 

Student pharmacists may be able to afford the occasional fast food treat, but these decisions can eventually become habits. Whether you continuously stay up late to cram for tests or run to convenience stores for caffeinated liquid sugar, you are setting the stage for the rest of your life. Making time to eat nutritiously, exercise, and sleep while you’re a student will allow you to start your career on the right path to health and success. Ingraining healthy habits now and continuing them throughout your career will give you the stamina needed to help patients and be a positive image of your profession.

 

Improve their health and yours

Once you begin to establish your own healthy habits, you will better relate to your patients through your own experiences. Instead of telling patients how to act, show them how to act. For example, instead of telling a patient that lifestyle changes are needed for disease prevention, describe personal examples of how you achieved your health goals by eating and exercising properly. Sharing your own experiences with patients will build support for their challenges ahead. When your patients turn to you for health advice and encouragement, expressing real, first-hand experience about how to live healthier will undoubtedly resonate.

 

In addition to helping patients, you can also improve your own health. A growing body of research shows that poor diet, decreasing levels of exercise, and increasing levels of stress are responsible for a large percentage of escalating health problems. Being a health professional does not give you immunity from disease. You too must work on improving your eating, exercise, relaxation, and sleep habits. Consider, for example, that sleep actually improves memory and keeps the immune system working properly, preventing annoying infections such as the common cold.

 

Sensing a dissonance between healthy habits and student health professionals, another pharmacy colleague and I created a multiprofessional student organization at the University of Michigan (UM) called Health Professionals for Healthy Living (HPHL). Since its inception in January 2013, HPHL has grown to encompass more than 250 student health professionals from dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, and social work, all pledging to live a healthier lifestyle by 

eating better, exercising more, and reducing stress.

 

The UM Hospitals and Health Centers is also taking steps to increase the health of its patients and staff by no longer selling regular soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks in its vending machines or cafeteria. The UM Medical School followed suit and is participating in the initiative, allowing students and faculty to make better choices about the beverages they consume. 

 

I believe more schools of pharmacy should adopt similar bold initiatives. Any policy change to eliminate the temptation of nutritionally empty foods or unhealthy 

behaviors is a step in the right direction. Although changes like this take time to implement, personal change can be immediate. Student pharmacists have the ability to transform the course of their life, improve their health, and be a role model for their patients and profession. The time to make those changes is now.