Back in 2014, an old friend called. He was a very high-level striking coach and an occasional jiu-jitsu student of mine.
As we chatted, I mentioned that I was dying of kidney failure due to Polycystic Kidney Disease and was waiting for a life-saving transplant.
Holy crap, was I ever not ready for what came next. He went on an alternative health tirade with evangelical fervor…
He told me that my body could cure itself if I just let it. He asserted that hospitals don’t cure diseases; they create them. Don’t do the surgery, he said; treat the underlying condition with acupuncture and herbal tinctures instead!
If I had followed his advice, I would have been stone-cold dead within the year, and you would not be getting this email.
Instead, I got the kidney transplant and flourished.
Now it’s important to remember that my friend wasn’t just some schmuck; he has more stripes on his belt than a bar code, and was the national head coach for a martial arts sport.
And it’s not just him. Bad medical advice is both endemic and epidemic within the martial arts community.
In fact, some of the WORST medical advice I’ve ever received in my life came from super high-level coaches.
Here are a few more examples, but they’re really just the tip of the iceberg…
A famous MMA guy was sure could cure my busted-up hip with digestive enzymes. Nope! It turns out that bromelain extracted from paypaya doesn’t actually shrink bone spurs and regrow cartilage, so instead, I got a hip replacement and haven’t looked back since.
I’ve been told that a staph outbreak was nothing to worry about and to keep training. Instead, I went home, and half the guys I trained with ended up on serious antibiotics.
An online friend of mine was gassing out during jiu-jitsu class and being hit by inexplainable bouts of fatigue. The peeps at his academy were pretty sure that he needed to do cold plunges and take Athletic Greens. Instead, he went to his doctor, who discovered a large thyroid tumour that needed treatment.
And don’t even get me started about the flood of disinformation spread by martial arts influencers about Cov… err… the disease that shall not be mentioned.
We understand this intuitively in other areas. You wouldn’t go to your car mechanic to get advice on investing for your retirement portfolio, right?
But something about the hierarchies and hero worship embedded in martial arts training makes our minds turn off, and we start trusting our instructors in areas waaaaayyyyy outside their expertise.
Take your black belt teacher’s advice about martial arts seriously. There’s a good chance that he’s right about that.
But for medical advice, go see a real doctor, because there’s a good chance they’re right about medicine.
(And note that I mean a medical doctor; you know, someone with the letters MD or DO after their name, not someone with an ND (naturopath), DC (chiropractor), or PhD suffix cosplaying at being a real doctor. Or, even worse, professional podcasters.)
Doctors aren’t always right, and – statistically speaking – some small percentage of them are grifters, cranks, or just plain crazy.
But overall, your odds of getting good medical advice going to a doctor are better than the other options. And certainly better than whatever your instructor has to say.
A black belt in any art is just a measure of that person’s skill within the art but is NOT a measure of their moral character, medical knowledge, financial savvy, or knowledge of astrophysics (I’m looking at you, flat earthers).
You’re going to need your body for a long time yet, hopefully. Take good care of it.