Anu Räisänen, director of EU health initiatives and assistant professor, co-wrote an article highlighting the importance of integrating the skills in medicine of lifestyle in the education of future clinicians.
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Anu M. Räisänen, Director of initiatives for Healtheu and deputy professor, alongside the co-authors of Linn County Mental Health and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, published an article On the integration of lifestyle medicine in the education of health professions.
The article, entitled “Integration of the content of lifestyle medicine into health professions programs”, highlights the importance of incorporating skills into lifestyle medicine in programs to empower future clinicians having the skills necessary for the prevention, management and inversion of chronic conditions related to lifestyle.
Research, published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, details the American College of Lifestyle Medicine Partial Academic Program Pathway. This initiative aims to integrate the content of lifestyle medicine in various higher level health professions programs, including physiotherapy and occupational therapy. The integration of skills in lifestyle medicine into health professions programs should improve patient results, reduce health care costs and improve clinician satisfaction.
Räisänen and his colleagues highlight the important role played by physiotherapists and occupational therapists in health promotion and the management of conditions related to the lifestyle. In the article, they describe how different programs have implemented the skills in lifestyle medicine and provide an example of a case of a doctor in physiotherapy.
This work underlines the potential of lifestyle medicine to transform education and the practice of health care, by preparing future health professionals to approach chronic diseases thanks to lifestyle interventions based on evidence that focuses on the six pillars of lifestyle medicine: nutrition, physical activity, stress management, restorative sleep, social connection and avoidance of risky substances.