Conventional Medicine Versus Lifestyle Medicine
Oliver, a truck driver sustained a head injury when he fell four feet off a flatbed trailer that he was loading insulation material onto.
He was rushed to the hospital and was treated immediately.
Conventional healthcare is the best choice for an emergency situation. Focusing on treating the injury or disease, conventional medicine makes you feel at ease.
Wrong Notion About Medicine
“Go on and have another burger and beer. Just get ready for drug therapy!”
When someone with cardiovascular disease or obesity relies on medical treatment that follows his unhealthy lifestyle, we have a problem.
People accept treatment through medicine as an inevitable reality when in fact, the majority of chronic illnesses can be prevented and managed through lifestyle.
The solution is not a lifetime of pills but a healthy lifestyle that lasts for a lifetime.
Two Approaches Beyond Compare
Conventional medicine and lifestyle medicine are different approaches to health care but they are not different practices.
Lifestyle medicine is the foundation of conventional medicine. Guidelines for chronic diseases support lifestyle medicine as the first line of treatment, before medications.
While conventional medicine acts as a band-aid in treating your symptoms, lifestyle medicine looks at the lifestyle that caused the symptoms.
Lifestyle medicine targets the root cause of the disease by focusing on the lifestyle choices that give rise to these diseases in the first place, such as nutrition, smoking, alcohol consumption, stress, and physical inactivity, among others.
4 Differences Between Conventional & Lifestyle Medicine
To better understand, here are four differences between traditional/conventional and lifestyle medicine approaches:
In conventional medicine, the patient is a passive recipient of care whereas the patient is an active partner in lifestyle medicine.
In this day and age when chronic diseases are common and have become the leading causes of death, patients now have to be partners in their own health rather than passive recipients who just accept prescribed treatments.
Treatment is often short-term in conventional medicine. In lifestyle medicine, treatment is always long-term.
Lifestyle modifications will be part of treatment in lifestyle medicine. This will take the patient to long-term healing.
Medication is often the ‘end’ treatment in conventional medicine. In lifestyle healthcare, medication may be needed, but the emphasis is on lifestyle change.
Doctors generally operate independently, on a one-to-one basis in conventional medicine. The doctor is part of a team of health professionals in lifestyle medicine.
Lifestyle medicine team includes lifestyle medicine consultants (i.e. physician, nurse practitioner, or other health care provider specifically trained to provide preventive health care) and health and wellness coaches.
In addition to the lifestyle medicine–trained provider, the lifestyle medicine team may include a dietitian, an exercise specialist, a psychological counselor, a sleep specialist, and other health care providers who focus specifically on preventing illness, mitigating risk factors and attempting to resolve the underlying cause of the disease.
Ultimately, the goal is to improve your health, avoid disease, and obtain an overall improved quality of life.
As philosopher Desiderius Erasmus famously quoted, “Prevention is better than cure.”
Blue Zone Health treats patients as a whole by combining traditional (conventional) and holistic (lifestyle) medicine to improve health and achieve greater wellness.
Improve your quality of life with the help of the Blue Zone Health team.
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References:
Battersby M, Egger G, Litt J. Introduction to lifestyle medicine. In: Egger G, Binns A, Rossner S, editors. Lifestyle medicine: managing disease of lifestyle in the 21st century. 2nd ed. McGraw-Hill Australia Pty Ltd; Noth Ryde: 2011. p. 5.
