Written by Dr. Marjorie Jenkins
Dean of the University of Southern California School of Medicine, Greenville
You’ve probably heard it a thousand times. exercise. Eat healthier. Lose weight.
as dean University of South Carolina Greenville School of MedicineWe know this is important advice for tackling heart disease, obesity, and other chronic diseases that are the leading causes of death and disability in our communities and across the country.
I also believe that medical schools can and must do more to provide physicians with knowledge and expertise focused on health and self-care to improve the health of their patients. Eating healthy, exercising regularly, and managing stress are all goals you should strive for. When prescribed by a physician trained in lifestyle medicine, these healthy behavior modifications can help treat or prevent disease.
The American Hospital Association estimates that 133 million Americans, nearly half the population, have at least one chronic disease. Heart disease affects more than 79 million Americans and accounts for 40% of all deaths. In the past 15 years, the number of people with diabetes has more than doubled. According to the American Hospital Association, obesity rates are rising among both adults (42.4%) and children (19.3%).
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronic diseases are the leading cause of death and disability. The National Institutes of Health reports that 80% of these conditions are preventable through lifestyle choices and early detection and management of risk factors.
At Greenville School of Medicine, I teach an approach to health known as “lifestyle medicine.” In this approach, future physicians are trained to partner with their patients by finding ways to improve their diet, reduce stress, improve their exercise habits, and leverage their healing properties. Food as medicine.
This medical evolution focuses on patients’ daily behaviors and builds strong doctor-patient relationships, making it an important tool to stem the long-term rise in chronic disease and its high costs. The University of South Carolina Greenville School of Medicine is the first medical school in the nation to fully incorporate education on nutrition, physical activity, and healthy behaviors into all four years of the medical school curriculum.
From day one, our students learn the six pillars of lifestyle medicine: eating healthy, exercising, managing stress, building healthy relationships, developing quality sleep habits, and avoiding substance abuse. . We incorporate 200 hours of lifestyle medicine into our curriculum.
Last fall, Greenville School of Medicine participated in the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, which presented a pioneering vision to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases by 2030. The school has pledged $4.8 million in in-kind contributions to help make that happen. We offer an open source lifestyle medicine curriculum for all interested medical schools.
In January, Dr. Jennifer Tolik, a nationally recognized expert and director of the Lifestyle Medicine Program at Greenville School of Medicine, served as a panelist at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Food is Medicine Summit. Trilk founded the program at the school in 2012 and has expanded the lifestyle medicine curriculum he requires from four hours in the preclinical era to more than 100 hours throughout his four years. She also partnered with the Greenville Institute of Technology and the Greenville YMCA to create a “classroom-clinic-community” model, offering programs that educate students with the goal of creating a healthy Greenville community.
And in April, Greenville School of Medicine became one of the first two schools in the nation to earn Platinum Plus designation from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine in the Undergraduate Medical Education Lifestyle Medicine Curriculum Accreditation Process.
Our free monthly “Walk with a Future Doc” event encourages lifestyle medicine within our community. The medical student discusses health topics and spends the rest of his hour walking and talking. Going for a walk, learning about health, and meeting new friends is a fun and safe way to go.
Awareness of lifestyle medicine has increased rapidly over the past few years, but physicians and medical students often have limited training in this approach, and some health care professionals are unsure how to properly change patient behavior. lack the skills and confidence to counsel others.
The American Heart Association reports that although physicians are in a unique position to encourage individuals to adopt healthy behaviors, lifestyle counseling is not routinely provided to patients. This missed opportunity can be attributed to many factors, including lack of time, reimbursement processes that encourage treatment over prevention, and a lack of knowledge and capacity to effectively deliver lifestyle counseling.
With increasing awareness of how lifestyle factors such as nutrition and exercise contribute to the prevention of chronic disease, medical schools are increasingly incorporating principles focused on healthy behaviors into their core curricula. But we need to do it faster.
Traditional medical school curricula do not include adequate instruction to educate future physicians about the importance of lifestyle to patient health, especially when compared to time spent on drug therapy.
If we do not train future physicians how to work with patients to prevent these diseases, our nation’s health care costs and the morbidity and mortality associated with chronic diseases will continue to soar.
Lifestyle medicine is a lifelong solution to living a longer, healthier, and happier life. We need to encourage each other to live better lives and make small changes in our daily lives. The accumulation of each will bring about big changes.
With increased attention to lifestyle medicine, we can improve the health of millions of Americans, starting in our own communities.
Marjorie Jenkins, MD, FACP, serves as chair of the University of South Carolina Greenville School of Medicine and chief academic officer of Prisma Health Upstate.
