By Mark Harvey

I talk to a lot of doctors, surgeons, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, therapists, health care administrators, etc. Some of them even talk back!

So, on the rare occasion that one of these interludes degenerates into an actual conversation, we often end up talking about — you guessed it — health care: how much it costs, why, where to get it, how to know if you’ve found it, why so many people need so much of it, how to avoid it.…

Yes, how to avoid it.

Well, wouldn’t you rather avoid “needing health care” if you could? I mean, “needing health care” often means that something is, or certainly could be, wrong, and most of us would prefer to avoid having something be “wrong.”

I think a lot of us see health care as something that’s done to us: Something is (or seems to be) wrong, so we have to go somewhere (sometimes, several somewheres) to get that something fixed. And in all these places, there are highly trained professionals who are doing things to us.

Oh, sure, as we’re being shuttled out the door, someone might tell us to go do this-or-that, or stop doing this-or-that, or whatever. But those bits of homework are afterthoughts — little things that are thrown out to us after health care has been delivered to us.

And then we go home.

So, as I’m having these little highly condensed, conversational tidbits with profesionals, I can’t help but notice that I’m hearing the same things over and over and over from them — the things we ought to do (and could do) to avoid needing health care. And it’s the same stuff, with diet and exercise topping the list.

I know many of you just groaned — I get that. You’re thinking, “Oh, great! Here we go with this again. I’m heading for the crossword puzzle!”

Wait! I said “I get that,” and I really do. Most of us are just trying to get from one day to the next, trying to wring some joy out of this life thing, and we’ve done the best we could with what we have for a whole lot of years — and now everybody wants to make us into one of the pictures we see in our minds.

Maybe it’s Jack LaLanne, or somebody a lot like him. Or maybe it’s one of those pencil-thin women who only eat green stuff, drive Subarus and run 11 miles every morning before yoga. Those pictures aren’t usually pretty (at least, for us). And since most of us will never be one of those “I’m so skinny I don’t even have a shadow” marathon runners, we just do nothing.

And changing how we live is a lot of work! I have to give up everything I love, start eating everything I hate and start doing things that hurt, and I hate, so I can live longer. Who wants to live longer if it’s just full of eating things and doing things I hate?

See? I told you, I get it. Here’s my “thing,” which you’ve heard before: Most of us aren’t looking to live forever; we just want to live until it’s time to do something else. “Live,” as in “have a life” — and it’s a lot harder to do that when a lot of your life is spent ricocheting from here to there, being on the receiving end of health care.

Quite awhile back, Medicare added coverage for preventive services to reduce obesity, which means no cost-sharing. I’m not going to get all into the insurance details of that coverage, because I think I’ve got you sideways enough for one day; but the bottom line is that you can talk to your doc (or whomever you see) about getting some help with the “weight thing,” and she or he can provide some counseling and some recommendations and some referrals and some encouragement, and actually get paid for doing it.

This is doable.

And here’s something else you’ll discover: Most health care professionals aren’t wild-eyed fanatics who are going to try to turn you into somebody you’re not. Most of them are pretty realistic and pretty down-to-Earth, because that’s where they live, too.

So, forget about diet and exercise, and forget about those pictures you see in your head when somebody talks about this stuff. Instead, just think about your life. Would you like to have more of it?

You’d be surprised by how little you have to do to do that. And this is doable.

Mark Harvey is the director of information and assistance for the Olympic Area Agency on Aging. He can be reached by email at harvemb@dshs.wa.gov; by phone at 360-532-0520 in Aberdeen, 360-942-2177 in Raymond, or 360-642-3634; or through Facebook at Olympic Area Agency on Aging-Information & Assistance.