RSS
Home
Drs. Roizen, Ornish, and Hyman push to rescue health reform with lifestyle medicine
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Three of the country’s top integrative medicine physicians, Drs. Dean Ornish, Mike Roizen, and Mark Hyman, recently finished collaborating on a statement advocating lifestyle medicine as a primary goal in healthcare reform. Titled “Rescuing Health Reform: Why Doctors Should Practice Lifestyle Medicine”, the statement calls for tackling the root problem—lifestyle— underlying the nation’s out-of-control healthcare costs.
Lifestyle factors such as diet, inadequate physical activity, smoking, and chronic stress, say the doctors, are the most important underlying causes of the chronic diseases that affect 160 million Americans and account for 78% of the $2.1 trillion cost of annual health care. They stress how lifestyle medicine is not just about preventing chronic diseases but also about treating them.
As a treatment, lifestyle medicine is often more effective and less expensive than drugs and surgery. It should be the foundation of our healthcare system, and physicians should be focusing on (and getting reimbursed for treating) lifestyle factors that lead to chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer.
The three doctors cite a recent study, the “EPIC” study, in which 93% of diabetes, 81% of heart attacks, 50% of strokes and 36% of all cancers were prevented in 23,000 people who adhered to just four behaviors (not smoking, exercising 3.5 hours a week, eating a healthy diet [fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and low meat consumption], and keeping a healthy weight [BMI <30]). Despite the strong scientific evidence that lifestyle medicine works and saves money, it is not usually covered by insurance. Since no one profits from lifestyle medicine, it is not part of medical education or medical practice.
If doctors don’t start practicing lifestyle medicine, and getting adequately reimbursed for it, healthcare will not be sustainable. If they are not encouraged to practice lifestyle medicine via changes in healthcare policy, research, education, and clinical care, healthcare reform will fail. The costs of treating chronic disease with medication, procedures, and surgery alone are too high and projected to bankrupt Medicare by 2017.
Instead, net health care expenditures could be reduced by $930 billion over the next five years, according to an analysis from the Cleveland Clinic cited by Drs. Roizen, Ornish, and Hyman, if lifestyle treatments are applied to all patients with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome (obesity), prostate cancer, and breast cancer.
For more info: visit Dr. Kathleen Jade's website at www.drkathleenjade.com
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
