One presumes healthcare workers have much healthier behaviors than the general population because they know better, but that's far from the case, especially in areas of weight control, binge drinking, and cigarette smoking.
"If you go down the list, in most cases, healthcare workers are no better than anybody else," says Kenneth Mukamal, MD, a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and principal author of a research letterentitled in part, "Do Healthcare Workers Practice What they Preach?"
The report, with co-author Benjamin K.I. Helfand, is published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Mukamal adds that the study is the first nationally representative study of its size to show such variation in health practices between healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers.
"Despite the fact that healthcare workers have a very good idea of what the consequences of overweight and obesity are, they don't do any better than anybody else," Mukamal says.
"You can view that as maybe not bad news, but for us, that those numbers were essentially statistically equal between healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers was to us a bit of a flag."
The research project used statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a telephone survey of 260,558 adults reporting 19 health behaviors in the United States in 2008 and 2009.
In a few of the health behavior categories, healthcare workers responded that they had behaviors that many said were less healthy than non-healthcare workers. For example, female healthcare workers over age 50 were 8% less likely than non-healthcare workers to say they had obtained recommended mammograms within the last two years.
And healthcare workers were 5% more likely to say they had consumed alcohol in the past 30 days than non-healthcare workers.
However, Mukamal says, those results may have underlying reasons.
For mammograms, he says, "many women would say mammograms are uncomfortable, and healthcare workers may be more in tune to recognizing than others.
But I think it might relate to the fact that actually, there's a lot of controversy these days over mammograms and in particular, how much of a benefit they have, and concerns about overdiagnosis of cancers that weren't going to ever cause a problem anyway.
So maybe they are saying, 'You know, I don't really want to find out something that isn't really that important anyway."
And on alcohol consumption within the last 30 days, there is debate and some evidence that moderate drinking is not only okay, but beneficial, Mukamal says.
Healthcare workers did report some healthier behaviors than their non-healthcare worker counterparts. For example, they said they were 19% less likely to say they had not exercised in the past 30 days, and 17% less likely to say they had driven a vehicle after drinking alcohol in the last 30 days. And they were 22% less likely than non-healthcare workers to report "heavy" drinking in the past 30 days.
And perhaps not surprisingly, healthcare workers had better access to most types of healthcare than non-healthcare workers. For example, they were 28% less likely to say they did not have a personal physician, 15% less likely to say they had not had a checkup in the past two years, and female respondents were 12% less likely to say they had not had a Pap smear in the past three years.
But they were 76% more likely than non-healthcare workers to report that they unintentionally fell asleep during the day, 22% more likely to say they used smokeless tobacco, and 5% more likely to say they had engaged in HIV risk behaviors in the last year.
But for other categories of life style and health behaviors, healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers were surprisingly about the same, Mukamal says.
Healthcare workers were only slightly more likely to use a seatbelt, and only slightly more likely to get recommended sigmoidoscopy/colonoscopy screening for colon cancer than non-healthcare workers.
Asked if healthcare workers may somehow acquire a sense of immunity to the diseases and conditions they treat as a defense mechanism, Mukamal replied that "that's possible. I generally think that healthcare workers can be blind to their own faults."