Episode Details

We've all met the doctor who skips the gym, the dentist who drinks soda, the tech worker who thinks his own product is garbage. The lazy answer is "people are hypocrites." The data says something far stranger: the people who know the most are sometimes the worst at following their own advice. Drawing on a University of Alberta physician survey, a 2024 Israeli study of healthcare workers, a Thai study of 842 dental professionals, and an MIT-Stanford-Harvard analysis of 5.8 million Swedes across 63 drug guidelines, we dig into why expertise can actually predict worse adherence — and why the word "hypocrite" may be the wrong tool entirely. Key sources: • Klein, Guenther, Ross, Do as I say, not as I do, *Canadian Family Physician* 62(7):e393-9, July 2016 — https://www.cfp.ca/content/cfp/62/7/e393.full.pdf • Finkelstein, Persson, Polyakova, Shapiro, A Taste of Their Own Medicine, *AER: Insights*, Dec 2022, via MIT News — https://news.mit.edu/2022/physicians-medicine-guidelines-1215 • Ramot, Tal, Rosenbloom, Comparison of Health Behaviors of Healthcare Workers and the General Public in Israel, *Int J Environ Res Public Health* 21(3):268, 2024-02-27 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10970418/ Episode 5879 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5879 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/394996)