> try getting someone to radically alter their lifestyle for the promise of potential benefit in 10-20 years.
There is an incredible amount of confusion with regard to appropriate lifestyle interventions. Part of the problem is that your predecessors' predecessors (doctors in the 1950's and 1960's) came up with some simplistic and wrong advice that never got properly withdrawn: the hazard of butter and the superiority of refined vegetable oil, the hazard of salt (farmers and veterinarians give animals salt licks), estrogen as "the female hormone" -> DES babies && prescription horse urine (PREMARIN is PREgnant MARes' urIN), etc.
The American Heart Association still warns about saturated fat [0]. If science advances one funeral at a time, what can be done about organizations that insist on being wrong?
[0] https://recipes.heart.org/Articles/1013/Healthy-Cooking-Oils
Modern medicine does have some good advice, but it's very tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. I think medical professionals are just as confused as everyone else. On Christmas I heard someone (a physician's assistant) recommend an erection-killing intervention to help stop her sister's boyfriend's hair loss [1].
[1] https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/news/20120413/propec... - this side effect might not be not universal, but is devastating to the men who suffer it.
"Palliative" drugs are commonly used. This is essentially Elisabeth Rosenthal M.D.'s rule #2 for American medicine: "A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure." [2]
[2] How Economic Incentives have Created our Dysfunctional US Medical Market - https://medium.com/@RosenthalHealth/how-economic-incentives-...
Dr. Brewer's pregnancy diet is supposedly quite helpful for dealing with common pregnancy problems. Iirc, the core pillars of this diet are adequate protein and "salt to taste". But conventional medicine never figured this out for itself - I've met lots of women who suffered from dangerously-high blood pressure during their pregnancies. One's diet consisted of saltine crackers - she was nauseous, and had to have labor induced before the baby killed her.
Appropriate lifestyle interventions start to benefit people right away. Coconut oil rapidly helps with alcohol cravings, for example. People can lose most of their excess weight over a period of 2-4 years. Pregnant women immediately benefit from adequate salt intake. Etc.
Doctors are doing much better today than 50 or 100 years ago. I think the industry would greatly benefit from a critical examination of common practices.