Lifestyle Medicine

Lifestyle medicine is an approach to decreasing disease risk and illness by utilizing lifestyle interventions such as nutrition, physical activity, smoking cessation, stress reduction, rest, and avoidance of alcohol abuse. At St. Luke’s University Health Network, we pride ourselves in being champions of lifestyle medicine to make life better for all our patients.

Internal Medicine is much more than “the management of chronic health conditions.” As physicians, we want to do more than just “manage.” We want to try to improve the health of ourselves and our patients as best as we can. We believe that it is possible to use an evidence-based approach that incorporates the aspects of nutrition, physical activity, stress reduction and sleep management. We believe that this is so important to the future of health care that it is part of your residency training from Day One. The curriculum is also designed to enable you to pass the certifying examination and become certified in Lifestyle Medicine at the end of your residency training. There are several components to this:

• Lifestyle Medicine Conferences: These specialized monthly conferences will occur one Thursday each month and focus on important topic areas including plant-based nutrition, exercise, and aspects of sleep health. These are attended by both faculty and residents in the family medicine and internal medicine programs at Anderson Campus. This will involve not only discussions with current faculty, but guest speakers and recognized experts in the field.
• Nutrition Based Journal Conferences: In addition to monthly evidence-based journal club, the focus of this conference is on peer reviewed articles that focus on food, nutrition and their impact on health and well-being.
• Lifestyle Medicine Service: This is an ambulatory, inter-departmental office providing lifestyle management consultation for patients. It will be staffed by members of the internal medicine residency, family medicine residency and department of community health. Our internal medicine residents will have the opportunity to rotate through this service during their ambulatory rotation.
• Division of Integrative & Lifestyle Medicine: Part of seeking the right answers in health and medicine is asking the right questions. For some questions, the answer is not readily apparent. The division of integrative and lifestyle medicine (a division of our Department of Research and Innovation) was created to help find the answers to these important questions using research methodology.
• Physician Focused Wellness: Lifestyle medicine is not just for patients, it is for us as doctors. Through our own organic farm located at Anderson Campus, both physicians and patients have access to healthy, organic food that supports health and the healing process. There is a gym on campus as well as dedicated walking trails around the campus. Can you imagine having a noon conference while walking on the trail around the campus? We can.