Lifestyle medicine: a cultural shift in medicine that can drive integration of care
Ellen Fallows
Abstract
Our traditional medical mindset and healthcare culture are being severely challenged. In the face of novel infectious diseases, such as Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), along with rising levels of chronic diseases, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, psychiatric illness, cardiovascular disease and cancer, many argue that current healthcare practices are failing to meet our needs. Energy and vision for a new way of practicing medicine are colliding, from both top-down, driven by policy, and bottom-up, driven by clinicians and patients. Policy makers have laid out the need for integration of healthcare delivery to address the complex chronic disease burden; creating integrated care partnerships, health and wellbeing boards and primary care networks to bring together 'at the place level' primary and secondary care, mental and public health services, social care and the voluntary sector. In practice, this is starting to build lasting working relationships between previously siloed services, to address the complex environmental, social, cultural, lifestyle and biopsychosocial drivers of ill health rather than simply providing access to hospitals, doctors and medication. Similarly, out of frustration with our traditional pharmaceutically driven medical model, grass-roots clinicians have built a new vision for their role in this better integrated health system, with the discipline of lifestyle medicine.