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Should doctors treat lack of exercise as a medical condition? Mayo expert says 'yes.'

It is very important to be physically active, as the lack of it consequently causes obesity, and is also known to cause diabetes, high blood pressure, joint damage and other serious health problems.

Rather than treating the consequent diseases, what if lack of exercise itself is treated as a medical condition? In the opinion of Mayo Clinic physiologist Michael Joyner, M.D., that is what should be done.

Physical inactivity does not just cause obesity. Being inactive is harmful for anyone, including people of normal weight or people who are at desk jobs and continue sitting for hours together every day, says Dr Joyner.  

Long periods of inactivity can decondition the body to activity, hence causing increased heart rate during physical activity, bones and muscles atrophy, physical endurance wane, and blood volume decline, Medical Xpress reported. Due to this deconditioning of the body, people get tired easily while trying to work out, experience dizziness and consequently give up quickly, making the problem worse.

"I would argue that physical inactivity is the root cause of many of the common problems that we have," Joyner says. "If we were to medicalize it, we could then develop a way, just like we've done for addiction, cigarettes and other things, to give people treatments, and lifelong treatments, that focus on behavioral modifications and physical activity. And then we can take public health measures, like we did for smoking, drunken driving and other things, to limit physical inactivity and promote physical activity."

Various chronic medical conditions occur due to poor capacity to exercise, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, better known as POTS, a syndrome marked by an excessive heart rate and flu-like symptoms when standing or a given level of exercise. Mostly, medication rather than progressive exercise is prescribed, Joyner says according to the report.

Joyner notes that with three months of exercise training, it is possible to reverse or at least POTS symptoms, a research has found.

The plus point of treating physical inactivity as a medical condition is that it would make physicians more aware of the necessity of prescribing supported exercise. This would lead to the development of formal rehabilitation programs that include cognitive and behavioral therapy, Dr. Joyner says.

People who are trying to start exercising are advised to take it slowly and progressively by Dr. Joyner.

"You just don't jump right back into it and try to train for a marathon," he says. "Start off with achievable goals and do it in small bites."

He also said that to increase physical activity one does not necessarily need to join the gym or hire a personal trainer. One can start with simply increasing activity in daily life like walking just 10 minutes three times a day.

His commentary is published this month in The Journal of Physiology.