By Blessed Kayode-Folorunsho
We will prescribe it, preach it, teach it, and then go home and do the complete opposite.
There is an unspoken agreement in healthcare that nobody talks about. We will tell you everything you need to do to live well, and then we will quietly go about living like regular, flawed, tired, caffeine-dependent human beings. We have heard every lecture, read every journal, passed every exam, and we still do exactly what you do when nobody is looking. Sometimes when everybody is looking.
I am a public health professional surrounded by doctors, nurses and every kind of healthcare worker imaginable, and I can tell you with full professional confidence, we do not have it together the way you think we do. Healthcare workers are some of the biggest breakers of the very rules we hand out daily. We do not follow all the rules. Not even close. Not all of us walk 10,000 steps daily. Not all of us drink two to three litres of water. A lot of us are running on caffeine, and soda is like a food group. And that is because we are human beings, just like you. We breach the rules too.
I am tired of the looks. Someone spots me with a soft drink or a plate of shawarma, and the whole performance begins. “With everything you know.” My parents take it even further: “A whole medical practitioner.” Please. Rest.
Since we are being honest, let me tell you exactly where else we fall short.
Sleep is practically a rumour in healthcare. We will sit across from you and counsel you on getting seven to eight hours with a completely straight face while surviving on four hours and what can only be described as faith. Burnout? We practically invented it. We tell patients to manage stress, take breaks and practice self-care, yet healthcare workers have some of the highest burnout rates of any profession in the world. The cobbler’s children truly have no shoes.
Ask a surgeon when they last had a proper meal at a proper hour and watch their face. They just finished telling you about balanced diets and regular mealtimes, and they have not eaten since Tuesday. We sanitise religiously in clinical settings and then live like regular people the moment we step outside; the irony writes itself. Some doctors and nurses smoke. Full stop. And do not get me started on self-medication; healthcare workers are notorious for diagnosing and treating themselves long before they consider seeing anyone else.
But here is what none of those changes. Doctors will still prescribe and counsel you. Nurses will still treat you. Pharmacists will still administer your medication. And public health professionals like me will still show up to help you prevent disease.
Our habits do not cancel our training, and they do not cancel our commitment to you.
People often assume that knowledge automatically produces perfect behaviour. It does not. Not for anyone. Does a financial advisor never overspend? Does a fitness trainer never skip leg day? Does a chef never order takeout? The same scrutiny people pour on healthcare workers, they extend to no one else. Knowing what is healthy and consistently doing it are two completely different things. We are not exempt from that reality just because we studied it.
And yet, the rules are still the rules. Do not use us as your excuse.
The fact that your doctor is not drinking two litres of water daily does not change what water does inside your body. The advice is not coming from a place of personal perfection. It is coming from evidence. We did not invent the 10,000 steps recommendation because we enjoy walking; the research behind it is real, whether we follow it or not. A traffic warden can tell you not to run a red light and still run one on the way home. That does not make running red lights safe. The road does not care who gave you the advice.
When patients use “even doctors don’t do it” as a reason to abandon healthy habits, the only person losing is the patient. We may be breaking the rules alongside you, but we are also the ones in the room when the consequences arrive. We have seen what happens. That part stays with us, even when we are eating the shawarma.
At the end of the day, I am a public health professional and my job is simple: to give you the right information so that you can protect yourself and the people around you. I will do that whether I had a balanced meal today or finished a bag of chips at midnight. The information does not become less true because of who is delivering it. We did not spend all these years gathering evidence for it to only apply to people who never crave a cold soft drink or a late-night snack. It applies to everyone, including us.
So do not watch us, watch the evidence. Do not follow us, follow the science. And the next time you catch your doctor eating junk food or your nurse reaching for her third coffee, smile, maybe offer them a biscuit, and then go home and drink your water.
We will try to drink ours too.
Blessed Kayode-Folorunsho is a master’s in public health student at Babcock University, Ogun State
