Source: Teaching doctors to teach patients about lifestyle Kate Murphy International Herald Tribune April 17, 2007
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine is a new national medical specialty society formed within the past two to three years to make lifestyle medicine a credentialed clinical specialty and a part of basic medical training.
Their philosophy is characterized by a quote from the organization’s president, John H. Kelly Jr., who holds that symptomatically treating disease without assessing patients’ lifestyles or offering them guidance on how to change is “irresponsible and bordering on neglect.”
Excerpts from the article:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 1.7 million Americans die and 25 million are disabled each year by chronic diseases caused or made worse by unhealthy lifestyles. And a 2005 study in The New England Journal of Medicine predicted that average life expectancy in the United States would decline in the next 20 years as a result of unhealthy lifestyles, reversing a trend dating to the 1850s. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine has 150 members in a wide array of specialties – nutritionists, ophthalmologists, gastroenterologists and oncologists, among others. Helping their cause is a new publication, The American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, which appears every other month with peer-reviewed research on the way daily habits affect health.
Lifestyle medicine proponents include researchers and clinicians from the fields of medicine and public health. While they agree on the importance of questioning patients about their lifestyles and giving tailored advice on how to make improvements, there remains disagreement about who should provide such counseling and with what sort of training. Nor is there a widely accepted prescriptive approach for encouraging patient compliance.
Proponents of lifestyle medicine are quick to distinguish it from alternative medicine. “This is mainstream medicine supported by mainstream medical research,” said James M. Rippe, associate professor of cardiology at Tufts University School of Medicine and the editor of The American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. “The lifestyle medicine movement is not an anti-procedure, anti-medication movement.” Rather, he said, it advocates that lifestyle interventions become part of the doctor’s arsenal in fighting disease: “For too long we’ve ignored our most powerful weapon when it should be our first line of defense.”
Commentary
While there is much potential from systematically integrating lifestyle medicine into clinical practice, I am most taken with the notion that patient compliance is an element of the same basic category as diet and exercise. That seems to me a more appropriate and useful conceptualization of adherence than as a pathology.
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine can be found online at LifeStyle Medicine
