healingways


Caring, Steering, Cheering A Health Coach Helps Us Change for Good


by Lauressa Nelson


A health or wellness coach integrated into a personal healthcare team can be critical to catalyzing sustain- able change. Many people understand they need to modify their self-care, yet fail to take the optimal steps to make such a transformation happen.


“


hat we’ve discovered is that people don’t rou- tinely change behavior due to education alone or out of fear. They change through partner- ship,” explains Linda Smith, a physician’s assistant and direc- tor of professional and public programs at Duke Integrative Medicine, in Durham, North Carolina. Coaching partner- ships supply a supportive bridge between provider recom- mendations and patient implementations, she says, “signifi- cantly increasing the client’s ability successfully.”


W to make changes


“Health coaching was ab- solutely essential to my health,” says Roberta Cutbill, a 72-year- old retired registered nurse in Greensboro, North Carolina, who considered her lifestyle relatively healthy when in her late 60s she experienced autoim- mune and cardiac prob- lems. “I have an excel- lent primary care doctor who, when these issues came up, told me that I needed to change my diet, thought-


fully downloaded a list of recommendations and sent me on my way. I still needed


22 Hudson County NAHudson.com


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