This post is about a topic I am quite passionate about. Warning: I’m going to be a bit enthusiastic here, and I’m going to talk about my own approach to practice.
Healthy living is pushed alot in media. But that doesn’t necessarily make us healthier. In fact, globally, complications from poor diet is responsible for more deaths than tobacco, high blood pressure, and a vast number of other risk factors.
There are a few unfortunate things that we do have to accept:
1. The industry of health, fitness, and lifestyle is worth €€€€ and extraordinarily poorly regulated, so it’s necessary to be a savvy consumer when sorting out what is fad or profit versus what is actual health or wellness advice.
2. Body image and health are too entirely different things. Positive body image is fantastic and good for mental health. What we want is also to have a physically healthy body, and help you be happy in a healthy body.
3. When we carry too much weight, it does put us at risk of entirely preventable diseases including liver disease, certain cancers, heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes.
4. Doctors – and some other health care professions – in Ireland have traditionally been poorly trained to communicate preventative health messages to patients.
Okay, so that’s the bad. What’s the good?
1. CORU is regulating the allied health professions. Choosing a CORU-registered physiotherapist or dietitian means you are getting advice you can trust.
2. Many of the conditions caused by lifestyle – from diabetes to high blood pressure – can be prevented or improved with lifestyle changes.
3. New initiatives are working to address this. I want to highlight one on Childhood Obesity. ALL healthcare professionals in Ireland can now do FREE online training to learn about the risks of excess weight in childhood, how to screen, and how to have discussions with family that doesn’t blame, shame, or stigmatise but work together to make some healthy choices to reduce health risks. I’ve done mine (because I work with adolescents as part of my practice) and I encourage my colleagues to do the same.)
Obstacles to change? Recognising and resourcing “lifestyle medicine”.
LIfestyle medicine is a specialty. It is not functional or integrative medicine. It is evidence-based preventative medicine focusing on biopsychosocial well-being. It is a doctor-patient partnership to work together with shared decision making and respect for long-term, sustainable changes to promote mental, physical and social well-being to reduce or reverse preventable disease processes (like diabetes or heart disease).
Problem is that lifestyle medicine hasn’t made it to the specialty register yet. It’s a Board Certified specialty in US, and diploma status in UK. This means, especially in a doctor shortage, you won’t see any consultant posts in lifestyle medicine yet in Ireland. In absence of specialty status, doctors who are trained in lifestyle medicine will have obstacles obtaining hospital privileges or indemnity for a private practice. What happens? Doctors trained in lifestyle medicine practice in their other specialty, incorporate lifestyle medicine into daily practice but are short of clinic time or resources (like partnership with psychologist, dietitian, or physio) to maximise what they could offer to patients.
I’ve done my training as a #lifestylemedicine physician. It’s part of the passion that drives this social media project. I take this to all my patient encounters, and daily practice “MECC” (make every contact count) with my patients. But doctors like me will drive smaller scale projects to start changing the conversations.
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