Seattle’s Alaskan Way; don’t walk if you can drive/Wikimedia Commons

That thing Americans don’t do

Arguably the most important advocacy group in a country today stalked by a declining life expectancy is one little-known and almost worthless.

We’re talking here about “Exercise Is Medicine,” a nonprofit co-launched by the American Medical Association and the American College of Sports Medicine in 2007 – more than a dozen years before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic killed more than a million Americans who’d largely given up on exercise.

If you watched any part of the Olympics on the TV, you might have caught the group’s 20-second public service announcements featuring Olympic athletes jumping out of the pool, ending a run, getting off a bike or otherwise finishing some exercise just in time to look into the camera and say, “Exercise is Medicine. Did you take yours today?”

Oh, wait. You didn’t see those ads?

Well, of course not, because there were none. Exercise is Medicine might have the ideal catchphrase for these times, but it appears to have no interest in selling the message to the public.

Hell, if you can get the group’s spokesman to answer an email, you’ll be doing better than I’ve been able to do for a month. Exercise is Medicine would appear to be mainly a clique of doctors and physical therapists interested in talking among themselves.

One has to wonder if it’s not just about assuaging their guilt about medicine’s role in the American slothdemic without really doing anything about it.

“EIM encourages physicians and other healthcare providers to include physical activity when designing treatment plans and to refer patients to evidence-based exercise programs and qualified exercise professionals,” their web page says. 

Like this is going to happen. There’s no money in it compared to selling drugs, treatments or even so-called “preventative care.”

Possibly there are some physicians and healthcare providers who design physical treatment plans that include activity or refer patients to evidence-based exercise programs, but the only ones I’ve ever encountered were involved in rehabilitating people after serious trauma.

From what I’ve seen of general practitioners in this country, if you can waddle into the clinic, they’ll be happy to give you prescriptions for all the things ailing you so you can waddle back out as a “healthier” you.

Children need to be told?

Meanwhile, the closest thing to a visible, national program actively encouraging exercise these days is the National Football League’s so-called “Play 60” initiative to “empower youth to get physically active for at least 60 minutes a day….”

It says a lot about how exercise has faded from American lives that there is a need to create a program to encourage the young to play. The young of all large mammals – chimps, bears, canines, cats, moose, you name it – naturally engage in play, and it used to be the same for young humans in this country.

As a kid in Minnesota in the 1960s, I and my friends ran all over the neighborhood all the time. We rode our bikes everywhere. We played “home run derby” in the street. We went swimming in the lake and in the river. We frolicked in the snow. We were always playing.

Nobody needed to tell us to exercise because exercise was part of our lives. Now, if you want to get kids to play, the NLF’s Play 60 web page will assure you there’s an app for that.

As for American adults – 75 percent of whom fail to take their daily exercise medicine, according to the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion – nobody wants to tell them they need to get up off the sofa or out from behind the desk or steering wheel and move.

Maybe, in some way, this could be considered a good thing in these hyper-partisan times. At least there is one thing on which the country’s two major political parties can agree; they’re not about to tell Americans to get off their fat asses and exercise because there is nothing in it for either party.

Their constituencies don’t want to be told to exercise even if the lack thereof is killing them.

As for all the well-meaning interest groups out there in addition to Exercise is Medicine, it’s more than a little ironic that they are lined up to lobby for social change to prevent future “global warming,” which might pose a threat to Americans in the future, but could care less about altering lifestyles that are killing Americans in the here and now.

Environmental groups have done a pretty good job of saving the whales. Now how about saving some homo sapiens?

Remember what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported at the height of the pandemic”?

Less than 6 percent of the COVID-associated death certificates in the country reported Covid as the only cause of death, and “for deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.”

Four additional illnesses.

America is a sick nation, and a big part of the reason why is that Americans have largely stopped moving unless they are in or on a machine. Americans don’t push lawn  mowers any more; they ride them. They don’t hammer nails; they use a nail gun. They don’t pedal bikes; they twist a throttle to power up their e-bikes. They don’t rake leaves; they blow them.

And they don’t walk to the local bar for a drink with friends; they take an Uber, or at least the responsible ones do.  A lot of the rest still drive to the bar as they drive everywhere else, and too often they do it while paying little attention to the road.

As a result, according to the CDC, “motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death among people aged one to 54 in the United States.” That’s not counting the people who die from driving too much and walking too little if they walk at all.

And while their failure to take their exercise medicine is killing them, they demand more and bigger roads to make the driving quicker and easier because it can never be quick and easy enough.

“The Soft American” of which President-elect John F. Kennedy wrote in 1960 would mop the floor with the average American of today.

“The knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself,” JFK added then. “But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.”

That was more than 60 years ago. The knowledge is now largely forgotten. It’s been relegated to the dustbin of history by the machines Americans now so love. Why, for a small fee, Dragon-Dictate can even free you from the burdensome task of typing a comment on this story.

It will happily type away while you sit and jabber.