Nutrition in medical education: Using both lifestyle medicine and conventional medicine to benefit patients

Should physicians use conventional medicine or lifestyle medicine to treat their patients? Those treatment protocols go hand-in-hand, so the best doctors will combine elements of both. School of Medicine Greenville Professor Jennifer L. Trilk, PhD, FACSM, DipACLM, explains why it is not a question of either-or.

Trilk is a co-author of “Proposed Nutrition Competencies for Medical Students and Physician Trainees: A Consensus Statement,” published in JAMA Network Open. The authors’ goal was to recommend nutrition competencies in medical education to improve patient and population health. She is the co-founder of the Lifestyle Medicine Education Collaborative, which has published free medical education curriculum materials on lifestyle medicine.

Jennifer L. Trilk, PhD, FACSM, DipACLM: I always say to the medical students, it's not an either-or. It's not either you put a patient on medication or you utilize lifestyle — they go very much hand in hand. So we don't want to demonize one or the other. You really want to use them as partners, as adjunct. If a patient comes in and has uncontrolled hypertension, you need to utilize the pharmaceuticals and the medications to bring that high blood pressure down so that the high blood pressure doesn't cause a stroke or myocardial infarction, which is called a heart attack, and yes, absolutely utilize those medications to help the patient. And then over time, because we know that lifestyle behaviors take time, over time, use the lifestyle modifications with the patient talking with them, so that they can eventually reduce the dosage of the medication, or maybe even reduce medication altogether. So we want to make sure that we utilize those hand-in-hand. But if a patient is newly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and, you know, has a has an A1c that's maybe in that 6.5 to 7.5 range to where they just have started that, we highly recommend, hey, let's talk with your patient about the changes that they may be able to make to not need to get on medication in the first place and put Type 2 diabetes in remission. Because there's evidence around that Type 2 diabetes absolutely can go into remission without medications if proper lifestyle is managed. There's definitely a place for both. The one thing I say with this, with our students and our future doctors, is, if you're going to utilize a medication, be a very responsible physician, and don't just send out a medication or prescribe a medication with your with your patient, without talking to them about their lifestyle and how they got that disease in the first place. That is being a responsible doctor. So utilizing both and making sure you're being responsible in your management of your patient.