Lifestyle medicine is booming—are you keeping up?
Industry Buzz
There's a real obvious hunger out there for how … we fill that gap of what's missing. How do we help people be well and thrive?
—Michelle Hauser, MD
Lifestyle medicine speaks to the underlying reasons that clinicians went into the healthcare field in the first place. It provides a framework of how to address the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic instead of focusing on treating the symptoms.
—Meagan L. Grega, MD
Lifestyle medicine is suddenly everywhere—hailed by many as one of the fastest-growing movements in medicine today. But despite its rising profile, many physicians are still unclear on what it actually is—and how it could transform both patient outcomes and day-to-day practice.
“Lifestyle medicine is … a medical specialty that uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to treat chronic conditions, including things like cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, obesity, and many others,” Michelle Hauser, MD, president-elect of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and Obesity Medicine Director of the Medical Weight Loss Program in the Stanford Lifestyle and Weight Management Center at Stanford University, tells MDLinx.
“There are certainly some people out there that are clinicians and physicians [or] other healthcare providers that practice entirely lifestyle medicine, but I would say the majority of people actually practice lifestyle medicine in addition to their initial medical specialty that they're trained in. I think of it as kind of adding the essential tools to your toolbox that maybe weren't focused on or included in the first place,” Dr. Hauser adds.
The 6 pillars of lifestyle medicine
Lifestyle medicine focuses on six pillars: optimal nutrition, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, connectedness, and risky substance avoidance. []
In doing so, lifestyle medicine aims to address the root causes of disease. Increasingly, many physicians find themselves aligning with lifestyle medicine’s goals.
“Lifestyle medicine speaks to the underlying reasons that clinicians went into the healthcare field in the first place. It provides a framework of how to address the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic instead of focusing on treating the symptoms of conditions like cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, obesity, and mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, with only pharmaceuticals and procedures. Lifestyle medicine offers the opportunity for health restoration instead of only a disease-management paradigm that slows down the trajectory of illness but does not reverse it,” Meagan L. Grega, MD, a director of the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, tells MDLinx.
A rise in popularity
Roughly 60% of Americans currently live with at least one chronic disease. [] Research suggests that lifestyle medicine can impact up to 80% of chronic diseases.
In 2024, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine was inducted into the AMA House of Delegates. [] Since then, membership has been increasing.
“Membership is certainly on the rise. We've hit more than 15,000 members,” Dr. Hauser says. “There's a real obvious hunger out there for how … we fill that gap of what's missing. How do we help people be well and thrive, instead of just [continuing to treat] sicknesses once they're really quite advanced?”
And it’s not just the patient population that is benefiting from growing interest in lifestyle medicine; physicians are also seeing benefits.
“I absolutely recommend training in lifestyle medicine for all physicians—both those just starting out and those who have been practicing for many years. Integrating lifestyle medicine into a clinician’s workflow often revitalizes their joy in practicing medicine as they see patients improve while also often decreasing pharmaceutical therapies, Dr. Grega says.
She continues: “Physicians who include lifestyle medicine in their practice are less likely to report symptoms of burnout. In value-based care clinical models, the treatment and remission of chronic disease through lifestyle medicine interventions can provide an impressive return on investment with cost savings.”
Related: 4 biggest risk factors for chronic disease, according to science