The choices we make in everyday life are truly powerful. Nothing proves this more directly than the various systems of lifestyle-based medicine and the remarkable progress being made in treating and reversing chronic disease.
Diabetes, obesity, cancers, heart disease, mental illness, and even serious autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis have responded to lifestyle-based medical approaches. Check out our RESOURCE section where we post promising examples of medicine that heals.
High-quality foods, clean environments, and healthy habits are all necessary supports to the therapeutic work of lifestyle-based clinicians as they seek to restore metabolic function, identify and remove root causes, and engage the body-mind-spirit’s capacity for self-healing. When the causes of illness are found in everyday life - which they often are - we gain a large measure of personal control over the disease process.
However, the journey of lifestyle medicine to gain recognition in the mainstream has been long and hard. Proving itself within the methods of modern science has been challenging. How does one put lifestyle, or even diet alone, under a microscope or into double-blind clinical trials? Not as easily as a single drug or therapy. Yet, over recent decades, researchers and clinicians have persisted, research has been funded, and evidence is mounting.
A patient’s personal healing journey can also be long and hard. Yet, many have persisted in one of the most difficult and most rewarding endeavors anyone could ever do: reverse a chronic disease for which most of medicine says there is no cure.
Making and maintaining lifestyle changes is hard work when we go it alone. Having others with whom to share the experience, to inspire us, and to hold us accountable can make all the difference. As does having access to well-trained, lifestyle-based practitioners, a need that many gifted clinician-educators are working hard to address.
Personal awareness of what has become possible can begin with researching the many online summits and presentations being curated at websites such as Health Means Everything and Medical Second Opinions Online.
“Living Well Locally” supports the healing goals of lifestyle-based medicine by encouraging the visioning and building of local wellness infrastructure: lifestyle practitioners, high-quality foods, clean air and water, social support, and community entrepreneurs who provide wellness products and services. As local wellness economies emerge, so too do cultures of health, and the ability of practitioners and patients to be successful in treating and reversing chronic disease becomes magnified.
LWL’s vision is to put medicine that heals into its most effective delivery context – the clinics, homes, and fields of the places where we live, where the social support of families and neighbors can multiply success, and where our collective actions ripple out to benefit others.
Lifestyle and food can do more than prevent illness, they can heal. When used therapeutically in a clinical context, they become an essential part of medicine’s new frontier: reversing chronic disease.
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Cleveland Clinic is leading the way in the traditional medicine side. They have a whole range of integrative and lifestyle medicine options and practices on their website. It takes a long time for cutting edge research to reach clinicians out in the field. That’s why we have to be our own advocates in the meantime.
I think it’s already being done.