Harvard CME | Lifestyle Medicine: Tools for Promoting Healthy Change

State-of-the-Art Approaches to Help Patients Initiate and Sustain Health-Promoting Behaviors

This immersive two-day course offers state-of-the-art strategies to guide patients to healthier lives. Education includes evidence-based strategies, tools and techniques to effect healthier changes in patients (and ourselves), including nutrition, exercise, sleep, weight loss, and stress management. This course also provides updates on payment structures that reward clinicians based upon patients’ health behaviors and health outcomes.

Past participants report a renewed passion for practicing medicine and reduced personal stress as they themselves learn to enhance their own health and to serve as role models for their patients.

Overview
Our daily work as healthcare professionals increasingly involves caring for patients with diseases that are ultimately caused by or exacerbated by poor diet, lack of exercise, stress, inadequate sleep, and smoking. Yet professional training does not sufficiently prepare us to leverage our position of trust to help patients initiate health-promoting behaviors. At the same time, we are seeing payment structures rapidly evolve to reward clinicians based upon our patients’ health behaviors and health outcomes. These factors have given rise to an overwhelming demand for evidence-based lifestyle medicine practices that have been shown to reduce patient risk for chronic diseases. That is precisely what is offered at Lifestyle Medicine in 2020.

Reasons to Attend in 2020
Highlights of the 2020 program include:

• Treating obesity
• Nutritional counseling
• Health and wellness coaching
• Promoting physical activity
• Exercise prescription
• Improving stress resiliency
• Interventions for sleep problems
• Nutritional reversal of cardiovascular disease
• Advising patients on vitamins and supplements
• Physical activity and brain health
• Leveraging mindfulness as a lifestyle medicine tool
• Clinician self-care: what it is and why it matters
• What really gets patients (even reluctant ones) to make healthy changes
• Leveraging lifestyle medicine to prevent and treat type 2 diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, depression, anxiety, osteoporosis, dementia, certain cancers, and sexual health issues
• When, why, and how to incorporate lifestyle medicine for underserved populations
• Positive psychology and the evolving science of happiness

Skills Advancement and Networking
Recognized experts in the fields of lifestyle medicine, behavior change, health coaching, exercise, stress management, and nutrition provide guidance and innovations for:

• Incorporating lifestyle medicine into your current practice
• Improving patient communication and motivational interviewing
• Building an effective lifestyle medicine team
• Engaging resistant patients
• Efficiently navigating the changing insurance landscape

You are actively encouraged to pose questions to and network with faculty as well as with fellow participants—like-minded health professionals who are seeking to promote lifestyle medicine as their practice pattern.

OPTIONAL WORKSHOPS