For professionals
When we learn anything new, there are always ‘key building blocks’ - the bits that we need to know first. Learning to find a pulse. Measuring blood pressure. Learning to talk with people who are our ‘patients’.
You will have your own challenges - it might be food, it might be a Social Media or Netflix addiction, or too much stress at work.
In Lifestyle Medicine the first lesson is learning to apply the principles to our own lives. Not aiming for perfection but for improvement. Changing habits, one at a time, so that we steadily improve our own health. We need to earn the right to share information with our patients.
Health professional are busy people. It’s stressful keeping up with everything we need to know in order to give our patients the best possible treatment.
This is especially true about Lifestyle Medicine - it’s not an area that we hear much about in training, and most of the courses we attend are about medications and local treatment guidelines.
Yet the evidence for Lifestyle Medicine is overwhelming - check this out in the Reference section.
Still not sure Lifestyle Medicine has a place in the NHS? Just check out the first page of most NICE guideline about Long Term Conditions - Type 2 Diabetes, Hypertension, cardiovascular disease - it’s all about Lifestyle. But so much of the training we have, and our day-to-day practice, is about ‘what drugs to give’.
Changing the way we practise is hard. We have habits deeply ingrained - how we speak to people, what responses we expect from them. And learning about Lifestyle Medicine, bringing it to the fore in consultations, is a challenge. We have all been ‘trained’ over so many years - doctors, nurses, patients - that the ‘right’ way of managing health problems is with pills, with medicines.
In the UK we have a number of GPs and broadcasters celebrating Lifestyle Medicine - too many to name here - and also the Zoe team, leading much of the UK science on how nutrition affects our health. But it’s a lot to read and understand - and then to decide which bits to pass to patients.
You will have your own challenges - it might be food, it might be a social media or Netflix addiction delaying your sleep, or too much stress at work.
For myself, I had to battle a sugar addiction - the result of an upbringing in central Scotland, where cakes and biscuits were fare more readily available than fruit and vegetables. And it took a long time to recognise just why my weight was increasing despite an otherwise healthy diet.
The purpose of this website is to make available evidence-based information about exactly what you and your patients can do to improve health, reduce the risk of developing chronic illness and live longer.
Feel free to use the PDFs in Resources to print out or send direct to patients. Let me know if you would like access to a Word document that you can edit or brand for your surgery. And tell me if you think there are errors in any of the documents - the PDFs are a summary of what I understand to be ‘true’ at the time of writing.
If you are reading this, and find that Lifestyle Medicine is becoming your passion too - have a look at Dr Dean Ornish’s work in the USA, where he has published studies on reversing heart disease, slowing cognitive decline, holding prostate cancer in check… all using ‘intensive lifestyle medicine interventions’.
Or have a look at the work of the late Dr Hans Diehl, and his Complete Health Improvement Program (CHIP), putting Type 2 Diabetes into remission, controlling blood pressure, making a real difference in obesity- again, by intensive lifestyle interventions.