The Value of Patience

By Alan R. Gaby, MD

A few weeks ago, I was taking a road trip on which there was a 28-mile stretch with one lane in each direction. The traffic flow was relatively slow—at or slightly below the speed limit. Often, when confronted with slow-moving traffic, I stay close enough to the car in front of me to be able to pass during one of those occasional times when the solid yellow line changes to a broken yellow line. On this day, however, I was not in a hurry, so I took a different approach.

The conventional wisdom is that a driver should stay at least two seconds (and preferably 3 seconds) behind the car in front of him, in order to be able to stop safely in an emergency situation. On this day, however, I chose to maintain an even larger distance – around six or seven seconds behind the car in front of me. While I was still traveling at the same speed as the cars in front of me, maintaining the additional distance shielded me from the compressions and rarefactions that are an inevitable part of driving in traffic. When the car in front of me slowed down, I simply took my foot off the accelerator and gradually decelerated as I moved closer to the other car. Using this method, I never came so close to the car in front of me that I had to apply the brakes. In fact, during more than 30 minutes of driving on that road, I did not have to press the brake pedal even once.

In contrast, the driver in front of me was following the car in front of him quite closely, and his brake lights were frequently going on and off. Similarly, the driver behind me was tailgating, apparently annoyed that I would not move a few seconds closer to the next car. Eventually, the car behind me passed me, accomplishing the questionable feat of promoting himself from ninth to eighth in the caravan.

It occurred to me that there are a number of advantages of maintaining a greater-than-usual distance behind the next car. First, it decreases the amount of wear and tear on the brakes. Second, avoiding repeated cycles of braking followed by accelerating probably decreases the amount gasoline used, which is good for both the environment and the pocketbook. And third, cruising along at a comfortable distance is easier on the nerves, although that ease is mitigated to some extent by the perception of being followed by an annoyed tailgater.

This leisurely road trip was a lesson in the value of being patient. And it reminded me of how that lesson applies to my professional life. Forty-six years ago, I decided that my life’s work would be to learn all I could about nutritional medicine and to teach others what I learned. Early on in this journey, I was frequently frustrated and angry at the unwillingness of the medical establishment to take a serious look at nutritional medicine or other alternative therapies. I was anxious to help start a revolution in healthcare and to get it going sooner rather than later. After a while, however, it became clear that any progress that was going to be made was more likely to be evolutionary than revolutionary. The entrenched powers that had shaped modern medicine’s world view (such as the medical schools, the medical journals, and the pharmaceutical industry) had built up too much inertia (i.e., resistance against change) to be overcome easily or quickly.

I came to realize that I had a choice between being angry at the slow pace of progress or being appreciative of the fact that things were moving in the right direction (albeit slowly). Those of you who have followed my writings in the Townsend Letter over the past 36 years may have guessed that I have shifted to some extent from the former to the latter. One of the laws of physics is that force x time equals mass x velocity. That is, the longer that we keep pushing, the greater will be the speed at which we can get from where we are to where we want to be (of course, the speed also depends on how hard we push, but that is a discussion for another day).

We can be encouraged by the fact that the acceptance of natural/integrative/holistic/alternative medicine has been accelerating over the past decade or so. The number of schools teaching alternative therapies, the number of practitioners using these types of treatments, and the interest among the general public are all increasing rapidly. Patience in the pursuit of a goal is being rewarded, and continued patient pursuit will continue to be rewarded. To paraphrase the Jewish text, Pirkei Avot (Ethics of our Fathers), we are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are we free to abandon it.