The Doctors - The Doctors 5-Minute Health Fixes: The Prescription for a Lifetime of Great Health

The Doctors wants to dedicate
this book to all the people who are facing
some of lifes most challenging health
issues and to those who are taking the necessary
steps to create a healthier lifestyle.
The Doctors, its experts, and
its production team are committed to bringing
our viewers the latest medical information and
tools for healthier living.

What is the one truly irreplaceable resource? Time.

We all want more time:

• more time to ourselves
• more time to sleep
• more time to develop our talents
• more time to travel, to experience new things
• more time with our spouses or significant others
• more time with our kids or grandkids
• more time to enjoy our lives

With an eye toward saving time, weve created machines to do our work for us. Think of all the time-saving machines weve developed over the past 100 years.

Instead of washing our clothes by hand, wringing them out, hanging them up on the line, taking them down from the line, ironing them with an iron heated over a fire (which was built by hand), what do we do?

We put our clothes into a box and press a button. Then we put them into another box and press another button. (Cant get around that folding, though.)

And think about our food. Instead of tilling the soil and growing our food, picking out the weeds every day, chasing down and slaughtering our dinner, plucking feathers, gutting deer, climbing trees or crawling through vines, chopping and slicing and canning, we do this:

We toss a package into a box, close the door, and press a button.

For most of us, all of this time saved is not translating into time spent doing things that improve our lives. With the time we save by nuking a frozen dinner or e-mailing a colleague who is 20 feet away, were more likely to... well, eat junk food and sit on our butts.

And as we squander that time, were also squandering our health. In the process of using more of these time-saving measures to save ourselves effort, weve been robbing our bodies of the exercise they used to get and the whole, fresh foods that we used to nourish them with. In a way, all those time-saving tools might actually be stealing time from usbecause we may be dying sooner.

Well, no more! Were here to show you how you can create time. How you may be able to add 2, 4, 10, 20 years to your lifegood years, active years. Fun years.

And youre going to do it starting today. Starting right now. Because were going to show you something amazing: You only really need 5 minutes to make a change that lasts a lifetime.

Every weekday since September 2008, weve come into homes all over America to help you make sense of the conflicting medical information that comes at you from so many sources. We debate each other and share our thoughts about the biggest health headlines, the most controversial new procedures, and the embarrassing questions that people are scared to ask their own doctors. We take that information and turn it into positive solutions that impact viewers lives.

If youve seen the show, you know we serve up our health information with a little bit of sass and a lot of science. Hey, were not only doctors, were also guinea pigs. From herbal teas to exercise machines to avocado facials, we love to try out as many of the cures we cover as possiblesometimes to very surprising, silly, or even (when were feeling brave) gross effect. And if we can have a chuckle in the process, all the better. Laughter is the best medicine, right?

But while we like to have fun, we also take our jobs very seriously: We want to help everyone in the worldincluding you!enjoy better health. We doctors can literally be lifesaversbut the only person who can keep you healthy is you. You have to make health a priorityand one of the best ways to keep it that way is to make it fun. Thats where we come in. We are:

Dr. Travis Stork, an emergency room doctor who plays a mean game of hoops (if he does say so himself). He taps into his experience treating thousands of critical and life-threatening medical problems to help you determine important health choices to make every day

Dr. Lisa Masterson, an obstetrician and gynecologist who cant live without her heels and helps women stay sexy and strong so they can live happy and healthy lives and empowers women of all ages at every stage of their lives

Dr. Jim Sears, a pediatrician who is always game to try the wackiest, scariest, and most disgustinghello, Neti pot!remedies with a goofy good humor that makes his little patients (and their parents) love him

Dr. Drew Ordon, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who gets jazzed by doing groundbreaking treatments on the air and who shows us that radiant beauty and good skin are well within the grasp of every woman and man in America, with or without plastic surgery

Between the four of us, weve received thousands of letters and e-mails from viewers all over the country. And we love that some viewers can come on the show to share their stories and ask for advice. Given the time constraint, however, we can only help so many people. Often, we find ourselves at the end of the hour saying, Man, I wish we could have talked longer about that, or I hope we answered that question fully. Its the quintessential 21st-century dilemma: Theres just never enough time!

Yet when we step back and consider those e-mails and letters and stories together, we see that, essentially, they generally boil down to the same question:

How can I enjoy my life and my health and stick around more years?

Now, no matter how much advice and information we can share in an hour of television, tackling that question is still a tall order. Which is why we decided to write this book.

In your hands, you hold the information you need to help answer that question. Weve developed solutions so simple, so straightforward, that you can start today, in just 5 minutes.

Sound too good to be true? We thought it might. But believe us: Youre going to be stunned by what we found.

As medical professionals, we always begin with science. We draw all of our recommendations, both on the show and in our own practices, from a methodology doctors call evidence-based medicine. Simply put, we combine our clinical experience with the most credible scientific information available to make the best possible recommendations to our patients.

With this approach to inspire us, we formulated a plan for this book: What aspects of health are the most critical to long-term vitality? Keeping in mind that, in todays crazy, time-crunched world, no one can do it all, what are the areas the average person can focus on to help safeguard his or her long-term health?

To find the answers, we looked at many dozens of studies examining millions of people throughout the world. We sought to isolate the aspects of health that most often corresponded with long-term vitality. And what we found was actually very straightforward: If we focus our efforts on 10 key areas of health, we can live longer, more vital lives.

As busy professionals ourselveswere all practicing doctors with active personal lives and volunteer duties, in addition to spending a few days a week taping the showwe knew that readers werent going to sign up for any inflexible, time-consuming program. So we crafted the advice in this book to fit into the typical all-too-crazy lifeinstead of asking you to reengineer your life to fit the program, weve engineered the book so that it truly fits you, your needs, your life.