What is Lifestyle Medicine and How Can It Benefit You?
Lifestyle changes often get mentioned in the doctor’s office as a way to enhance your health. In recent years, lifestyle medicine has been on the rise. It is an approach that uses evidence-based behavioral interventions to prevent, treat, and manage chronic disease. It includes examination of your lifestyle as well as your physical health, followed by personalized guidance from a physician.
Focusing on preventative measures, lifestyle guidance, and interventions might include quitting smoking or drinking, exercise, nutrition, medical weight loss, and minimally invasive treatments like OMT. Through this approach, you may be able to reduce your health risks and even cut back or avoid medication. Many patients also feel healthier and more in control after implementing lifestyle changes.
Reduce Health Risks
One of the possible benefits of lifestyle medicine includes reducing health risks. People who have a history of chronic health conditions in their families, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, clinical depression, cognitive diseases, and high cholesterol, may be able to reduce their risk of getting these diagnoses. Making lifestyle changes, even small ones, can improve your overall health outlook. For many health issues, improving nutrition and movement can have a positive effect on a person’s blood pressure, weight, and cholesterol numbers. Stress reduction may also be a target of this approach, which can help with migraines, depression, and other issues.
Feel More Control Over Your Health
Lifestyle medicine approaches may be able to help patients improve their management of chronic conditions, such as diabetes and migraines. Eating better, losing weight, and exercising can all contribute to a better quality of life for people with diabetes. This can help reduce the use of insulin or other medications to control blood sugar. Using a lifestyle medicine approach, a person may be able to identify migraine triggers in their diet and home to reduce their occurrence. These are only a couple of examples of ways this personalized treatment approach can help a person feel more control over their health.
Support for Lifestyle Changes
One of the greatest benefits of seeing a physician who practices lifestyle medicine is getting support for the changes one needs to make. Lifestyle modifications are great for avoiding pills and injections, but it takes time and support to make changes in your life. With the direction of an independent physician who practices lifestyle medicine, you receive some of the support necessary to make permanent lifestyle changes that will benefit your long-term health.
The lifestyle medicine approach creates a pathway for enhancing health and reducing symptoms of chronic conditions. Contact Infinity Medical Clinic in Marion to discover how Dr. Stemmerman could implement a lifestyle medicine approach with you.
