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EXERCISE IS MEDICINE


LIFESTYLE MEDICINE


WORLD WORLD


FOCUS


The Institute of Lifestyle Medicine in the US aims to reduce lifestyle-related diseases by training clinicians in how to prescribe exercise to patients. Founder and director Edward Phillips


talks to Julie Cramer about the institute, and why health clubs should be involved with the health system


The whole field is about using lifestyle interventions, such as diet and exercise, as a therapeutic and preventative approach to common ailments such as heart disease, obesity and cancer. As a rehabilitation specialist, I’m particularly focused on using exercise for whatever ails you: whether you’ve lost a leg, had a stroke or hit your head, we’re convinced exercise will help you feel better.


Q


What is lifestyle medicine?


But it’s not just about exercise – it’s


how you sleep, if you smoke or drink, what you eat. All these things combined are key factors in lifestyle medicine.


I’m a practising physician with a background in rehabilitation, and I started writing about these things in 1999. By 2005, we’d launched an online programme from Harvard Medical


Q


How did the institute come to be launched?


Institute founder and director Edward Phillips


School called Lifestyle Medicine for Weight Management. That course has been completed by over 2,000 clinicians around the world, from 115 countries. Then, in 2006, we went to India to


deliver a lifestyle medicine course to clinicians in four cities. Recognising the global interest in, and need for, our course, we decided to set up an institute devoted to the topic. The Institute of Lifestyle Medicine was born, based at Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, within the Joslin Diabetes Center.


Q


What does your work involve?


Our main goal is to retrofit physicians with the knowledge that’s so important now, but that they never learned in med school. Highest on the list is teaching them about exercise, followed by motivation through health coaching, as well as improving their knowledge of lifestyle dangers such as stress. We run a number of training courses


and offer, among many other things, two main conferences a year, which attract delegates from all over the world.


Q


Doctors are taught to talk to patients about exercise


80 Read Health Club Management online at healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital


Does that mean more recently qualified


doctors are better equipped to tackle lifestyle diseases? Actually it’s still not well covered by medical schools, if at all. There was a study done in the UK recently, in which over 30 medical schools were asked


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