What Everyone Should Have

Something is obviously wrong with me. I have a lawyer, an accountant, and an internist, but unlike many of my patients and friends, I do not have a trainer. I am old enough to remember when only prize fighters and race horses had trainers, but now it seems that everyone who is middle aged and middle class has someone who comes to the house, makes them sweat, and walks off with their money-all in the name of better health and appearance. My immigrant grandparents would have been astounded by today's happenings. Why, they would probably ask, can't people simply go for a walk by themselves? My answer would have been, “Nobody now does anything by himself or herself. Besides, it is too simple.” The more complex you make your life, the more mystique it has. I suppose any historian would have predicted that when we gave up the outhouse, anything could happen. Look what is in our bathrooms today: sprays, jets, apparatuses that only a senior pilot, male or female, could operate. Shades go up and blinds come down by electricity. The same people who have trainers come to their house have every means to avoid work around the house. As someone who does aesthetic surgery and enjoys it (but only when the result pleases the patient), I should be glad for all this zeal devoted to improving the body. Looking good and feeling fine are national obsessions among those wealthy enough not to have to do manual work. It is one thing to put flagstones in the patio of your second home but quite another to earn your living as a mason (and I am not referring to the thirty-second degree type). Who jogs? I am not sure, but I would guess that the ranks do not contain many who deliver mail, wear hard hats, and landscape to pay for their family's shelter and education. They are their own trainers, or rather, the exigencies of their job train them. For the rest of us, it is catchup. I confess to scores of years as a semiaddict to exercise, more recently swimming four to five times a week, for the past 10 years or so, until my left shoulder developed bursitis, now thankfully responding to the advice and steroid injections of my orthopedic surgeon. During this time, I have substituted taking long walks and huffing my way up five to seven flights in my hospital. You would be surprised whom you encounter in the back passages of such an institution. Most of the people are residents, coming to work, rocketing up the stairs with backpacks, hardly a joyful reminder to me of my age. Yet, I hold my own-going down. As a personal confession, I have to share an observation, made by several people, that I have never looked better. How this is happening, I do not know. Can it be that years of physical self-punishment were not for me? My mother, to whom I should have listened on many other occasions, remarked that the people who live the longest are the Popes, and “they used to be carried from room to room.” Whether or not this remark is valid for the Vatican, it is true for a lot of my patients and friends. A surprising number bear the stigmata of the exercise craze: appointments with the bonesetters, bandages around various parts of their anatomy, and refused invitations to play tennis because they are “getting over” something or another. In this age of paranoia, which is a very useful mechanism to survival, I have had a recurring and uncomfortable thought that behind all this exercise fad lies a clever crew marketing for orthopedic surgeons and corner drug stores that supply dressings and liniments. I remember but I cannot place an article that supposedly said that we extend our life span by as much time as we devote to exercise. At 2 hours four times a week, it would be approximately 17 days a year or 1½ years over a period of 20 years. I suppose it is worth it if the extra years were filled with joy: more vacations, fewer taxes, more vacations, less work. The box score still is not in on how the presence or absence of a trainer may affect the outcome. For one of my patients, a busy executive (too busy), the arrival of his wife's trainer resulted in the departure of his wife-in the trainer's car. Please understand that I am not against personal trainers. In fact, for the economy, it is a good idea. Services devoted to improving an individual's comfort seem to be the busiest segment in our economy. I am looking forward to the day, however, when the personal trainer comes to my house-bringing a pizza with “everything on it” that we can both consume after the session. What I truly need is not a trainer but a strainer, someone who can screen me from the petty demands of the day-you know, the things we do to get ready to care for the patient without really doing so-the forms that we must complete, the meetings that we must attend, the nagging diversions that would sap the energy of a Hercules, who fortunately was smart enough to live before the days of managed care. By the way, who was Hercules' trainer? Robert M. Goldwyn, M.D. 1101 Beacon Street; Brookline, Mass. 02146