Patient advocate: What is ‘lifestyle medicine’?

We’ve known for decades that the foods we choose to eat and the habits (good and bad) we develop have a profound impact on our quality of life and health. At your regular appointments with your primary care provider, you are probably quizzed about your diet, alcohol consumption, drug use and level of activity.

Typically, doctors don’t have the time during the 7½ minutes they spend with you to connect the dots and help you make meaningful changes in those aspects of your life. It’s not their fault; most of them are at the mercy of insurers and corporate overlords.

So it’s usually up to us to change our lifestyle.

A branch of medicine emerged about 30 years ago — lifestyle medicine — in which an integrated group of practitioners, from internists to gastroenterologists to psychologists to nutritionists to pharmacists, supports people on this journey.

Lifestyle medicine gained momentum in the 2010s because of the explosion of chronic diseases, rising health care costs, stronger long-term data linking lifestyle to health, and dissatisfaction with medication-only approaches.

By the 2020s, many major health systems began integrating lifestyle medicine clinics.

There are a number of lifestyle medicine practices in Chicagoland, including Northwestern University’s Center for Lifestyle Medicine.

In 2004, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) was founded, and earlier this year it launched a certification program for health care professionals who want to bring the practice to their patients.

Lifestyle medicine focuses on what it calls six “pillars” to address the root causes, not just the symptoms, of chronic illness. Those pillars are

Their goal is to treat, reverse and even prevent chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease using evidence-based methods that may be used in conjunction with medication.

As long as you have a diagnosis of a chronic disease and are treated by a licensed health care professional, it’s likely your insurance company will cover care from a lifestyle medicine practice. Services like “wellness coaches” or “lifestyle programs” may not be covered.

Now, if all of this sounds a bit like Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), the signature program of our current health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you’re not wrong. Kennedy is a proponent of people exercising and eating healthier in order to take control of their own health.

So there are areas where MAHA and lifestyle medicine overlap, but the ACLM emphasizes that it’s a health care approach, not a political movement.

Lifestyle medicine supports vaccines, research-based conventional treatments and standard medical guidelines. Practitioners would agree that improving diet, sleep and stress management is good public health policy, and those tenets exist independently of politics.

That said, the ACLM supports coming changes in Medicare that are in alignment with its goals. The Make America Healthy Again: Enhancing Lifestyle and Evaluating Value-based Approaches Through Evidence (MAHA ELEVATE) for Original Medicare was announced in December. Launching later this year, it will provide funding for “evidence-based, whole-person care approaches” not currently covered by Original Medicare.

I don’t think there’s anything about lifestyle medicine that’s inherently controversial or political. Those six pillars are certainly within the realm of traditional medical practice. And you can use the pillars on your own to improve your health, whether that means eating more plant-based foods, practicing mindfulness for stress reduction, going out to lunch with friends, quitting tobacco or taking a daily walk.

But many people need the advice and support of medical professionals to make the changes they need to become healthier and manage chronic diseases. If that sounds like something you need, you can learn more about lifestyle medicine at lifestylemedicine.org and see if it would be a good fit for your health care journey.

• Teri (Dreher) Frykenberg, R.N., a registered nurse and board-certified patient advocate, is the founder of www.NurseAdvocateEntrepreneur.com, which trains medical professionals to become successful private patient advocates. She is the author of “How to Be a Healthcare Advocate for Yourself & Your Loved Ones” and her new book, “Advocating Well: Strategies for Finding Strength and Understanding in Health Care,” available at Amazon.com. Contact her at Teri@NurseAdvocateEntrepreneur.com to set up a free phone consultation.