Lifestyle Medicine
Lifestyle Medicine
What is lifestyle medicine?
Lifestyle medicine is a medical specialty that focuses on behavioral changes to promote healthy lifestyles. It also addresses unhealthy behaviors that contribute to chronic diseases. It aims to prevent those diseases and effectively manage them through a healthy lifestyle.
Our lifestyle medicine providers educate and motivate patients to improve their behaviors in six main areas:
- Healthy eating habits
- Increased physical activity
- Effective stress management
- Supportive social connections
- Adequate sleep
- Avoiding risky substance abuse
Do lifestyle medicine providers prescribe medications?
Because we focus on treating the underlying, behavior-related causes of disease, lifestyle medicine providers usually use medications as a supplement to therapeutic lifestyle changes rather than a primary treatment. They may also use complementary therapies, such as acupuncture, yoga, massage, and osteopathic manipulation therapy, to optimize patient healing.
With this approach, we educate, guide, and support positive behavior changes that allow the body to protect and heal itself. We encourage patients to be active participants in their own care.
How is lifestyle medicine different from functional medicine?
This approach may sound similar to functional medicine, and it is. Both are holistic methods that focus on underlying causes of disease. Lifestyle medicine focuses more on how you live your daily life. It’s a more preventative approach, focusing on the six pillars, or healthy habits, mentioned above.
Who would benefit from lifestyle medicine?
Lifestyle medicine works well for anyone age 12 and older who would like to:
- Develop an active lifestyle
- Improve their nutrition habits
- Reduce their medication intake
- Prevent or improve chronic medical conditions (such as diabetes, heart disease, strokes and cancer)
- Feel better and find more enjoyment in life
