Institute for Population Health, Divisions of Pre-Medical Education and Admissions presentBuilding Capacity in Healthcare Professions SymposiumFebruary 18 & 19, 2017 | Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar

Moving Beyond the Pill: Lifestyle Medicine

Ravinder Mamtani, MD and Sohaila Cheema, MBBS, MPH
Institute for Population Health, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar

Overview

“Lifestyle medicine is the evidence-based therapeutic approach to prevent, treat and reverse lifestyle-related chronic diseases. Comprehensive lifestyle interventions (including nutrition, physical activity, stress management, sleep, social support and environmental exposures) address underlying disease risks, thereby decreasing illness burden and improving clinical outcomes within value-based medicine.” (1)

Qatar is currently grappling with high rates of overweight (70%), obesity (41%), diabetes (17%) and other chronic disease (2). Treating the disease and not addressing the underlying causative risk factors leads to poor quality of life and patient outcomes. Also, peer reviewed literature has shown that health practitioners lack knowledge and skills about lifestyle medicine.  Integrating lifestyle medicine practice   in our healthcare delivery system can result in favorable patient outcomes as well as reduce premature mortality (3).

It is, therefore, essential for healthcare practitioners to possess adequate knowledge of lifestyle medicine and relevant skills related to it.  Lifestyle medicine training will allow healthcare practitioners to engage with the patients to help them understand, adopt and practice healthy behaviors. This will ultimately promote self-care, empower the patient and improve overall health and quality of life of the patient (3).

In the workshop, participants will explore facets of lifestyle medicine, its utility and how its practice can be successfully incorporated in healthcare delivery. Participants will discuss a) population health benefits of lifestyle medicine and b) potential challenges in its implementation and how to overcome them.

Objectives

At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

  1. Recognize the role of lifestyle medicine in reducing the burden of chronic disease
  2. Discuss the core competencies of lifestyle medicine
  3. Examine the challenges to implementing lifestyle medicine
  4. Explore potential solutions to the challenges

Workshop Structure

The workshop will begin with a thematic discussion of lifestyle medicine. This will be followed by small group discussions on select topics. The small group representative/s will share their thoughts and ideas with all the workshop participants.

References

  1. American College of Lifestyle Medicine. http://www.acpm.org/page/lmprogram. Accessed on December 10, 2016.
  2. Qatar STEPS Survey 2012. Fact Sheet. Available at [PDF]. Accessed on December 10, 2016
  3. Physician competencies for prescribing lifestyle medicine.  Liana Lianov; Mark Johnson. JAMA. 2010;304(2):202-203. doi:10.1001/jama.2010.903 . Available at: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/186192. Accessed December 10, 2016
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