Aren’t all doctors trained in lifestyle related conditions?

A question I get often from my patients who come to see me because I am a lifestyle medicine practitioner, is aren’t all doctors trained in lifestyle related conditions? And the truth is, yes, all doctors are trained. To understand conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gout, osteoarthritis, type two diabetes, all doctors have the ability to make a diagnosis of those conditions and treat them according to the guidelines of treatment.

Now those guidelines of treatment are generally highly influenced by the pharmaceutical companies, which means that those guidelines promote the use of medications. Lifestyle medicine, doctors generally go to the source or the cause of those lifestyle related conditions. So if you take osteoarthritis for instance, this is an inflammatory condition that results in wear and tear of the joints, but it is something that can be managed or even reversed through lifestyle interventions.

What a traditionally trained doctor would do is say, well, you’ve got osteoarthritis. Here’s an anti-inflammatory. Take that, and it’ll help you with the pain. What a lifestyle practitioner will do will look at your nutritional intake and see if there are factors there that are promoting inflammation.

We’ll look at other factors in your life like sleep and stress, that also promote inflammation. And we’ll work perhaps with supplements and definitely with physical activity to help to promote the muscles around the affected joint to strengthen support that joint. So that we stop the degeneration or even allow the joint to regenerate over time.

So lifestyle medicine goes to the source of the problem, whereas traditional medicine simply often treats the symptoms or the consequences of that condition rather than managing the cause and trying to reverse it.