Teaching Doctors to Teach Patients About Lifestyle

From The New York Times:

To what extent does lifestyle cause or contribute to disease and disability? And what exactly is a healthy lifestyle anyway? There is much confusion about what type of diet or exercise is best, not to mention how much sleep, stress or sex is ideal. Nor is it clear how best to motivate people to change their habits.

This lack of clarity has inspired a growing movement to inform health professionals and patients about the importance of lifestyle in preventing and treating disease. Its aims are to disseminate scientific research about what it means to live well and to encourage doctors and other providers to incorporate this knowledge into their practices.

Two years ago, a group of doctors founded an organization with the goal of making lifestyle medicine a credentialed clinical specialty and a part of basic medical training. Symptomatically treating disease without assessing patients’ lifestyles or offering them guidance on how to change is “irresponsible and bordering on neglect..."

Still, he acknowledges that there are significant obstacles, because lifestyle counseling is time-consuming and is seldom compensated by Medicare or health insurers.

Reimbursement is a chief concern of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. The group plans to lobby Congress to that end. And it wants Congress to require that patients be informed about the relative effectiveness of lifestyle changes before receiving certain medications — including blood pressure, acid reflux and cholesterol drugs — and before undergoing procedures like back surgery, bypass surgery and stent placement.

But first, Dr. Kelly said, patients and insurers need to be assured of the professionalism of lifestyle medicine providers.

The group seems overly focused on distinguishing itself from alternative and complementary medicine, which I understand but find unfortunate. Then again, many practitioners of alternative medicine are less hung up on reimbursement, and considerably more willing to spend time with, and listen to, their patients than most conventional practitioners. As I have learned. (And my conventional physicians have mostly been excellent.)