As medical professionals, we are conditioned to prescribe, to heal, to enhance. Our patients anticipate it, and to be honest, so do we. I have crafted a career focused on lipid levels, clinical studies, and medications designed to reduce cardiovascular risk by mere percentages. Yet recently, I find myself suggesting something far less sophisticated and much more transformative: a walk.
Walking is leisurely. Inefficient. Hardly the most effective option. Which is precisely why it is significant.
Surrounding us, the health care discourse is filled with figures: daily steps, calorie counts, VO2 max measurements. Patients arrive with apps, gadgets, and inquiries about the latest injectable that claims not only to promote weight loss but also to offer eternal life. However, the nervous system does not require another quick fix. What it yearns for is simplicity, movement at a naturally human rhythm.
When you walk, you reconnect. Not solely with your cardiovascular health, but also with your mental state. You regain your breath, not from having exhausted yourself by sprinting, but because you’ve finally allowed yourself to decelerate. You start to observe: the maple tree in your neighborhood beginning to change color, the neighbor you’ve waved to but never conversed with, the tranquility amid your own reflections.
Patients sometimes appear taken aback when I recommend walking as if it were a statin. Yet, I’ve seen walking achieve results that no medication can replicate. It does indeed reduce blood pressure, yes; but it also diminishes obsessive thoughts. It enhances insulin sensitivity, yes; but it also fosters resilience. And unlike almost every other intervention I could propose, walking necessitates no prior authorization struggles, no copay, and no side effects that surpass its benefits.
Yet, there exists a contradiction. Walking often seems unproductive. In a society fixated on efficiency, the act of reducing speed can feel like failure. Patients, and doctors, frequently resist it for this reason. We prefer to optimize, quantify, and monitor rather than take the chance of being present.
But wellness does not transpire at eighty miles per hour. It emerges when we create space for slowness.
Therefore, here’s my recommendation: Set aside your phone. Leave the tracker at home. Opt for the longer path through your community or, if you’re interested in my personal favorite, meander through a cemetery trail. The gravestones provide a reminder of scale and perspective. The pace compels you to breathe differently. The lack of urgency realigns a body and a mind conditioned to believe it must constantly be accomplishing more.
I have started to believe that walking is not merely exercise. It is a form of medicine.
Larry Kaskel is an internist and a “lipidologist in recovery” with over thirty-five years of medical practice. He manages a concierge practice in the Chicago vicinity and is part of the teaching faculty at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Additionally, he has ties with Northwestern Lake Forest Hospital.
Before podcasts became ubiquitous, Dr. Kaskel hosted Lipid Luminations on ReachMD, where he created a collection of over four hundred programs with prominent figures in cardiology, lipidology, and preventive health.
He authored Dr. Kaskel’s Living in Wellness, Volume One: Let Food Be Thy Medicine, works that merge evidence-based medical practice with user-friendly strategies for enhancing health span. His current endeavors focus on reevaluating the cholesterol hypothesis and exploring the infectious origins of atherosclerosis. More details can be found at larrykaskel.com.