Lifestyle Medicine – an evidence-based approach to healing
As history shows, lifestyle as medicine was the way to practice medicine thousands of years ago. Currently, there is compelling evidence-based science that supports the important benefits and effects of lifestyle on our health. Approximately 80% of the most prevalent chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, dementia, and cancer can be prevented, treated and some even reversed with consistent positive lifestyle change.
PAMS South Florida member, Dr. Karla Arancibia, has been leading this innovative approach in Latin America, especially in Peru, through lifestyle medicine coupled with health and wellness coaching and culinary medicine. Dr. Arancibia has focused on the prevention of premature death and chronic disease through behavior modification intervention to help patients achieve sustainable change. Through this individualized patient-centered approach, the doctor-patient relationship takes a new angle as a health and wellness coach to help build the necessary skills to create a balance in the 6 fundamental pillars of Lifestyle Medicine, which include nutrition, physical activity, sleep health, stress management, avoidance of risky substances, and social connectivity. This important adjunct to health management has proven to provide the results needed for a lasting, healthy change in patients to reach longevity with quality of life.
As part of this movement, Dr. Arancibia has started the first chapter of Walk-with-a-Doc in Peru, in March 2023, as well as a new chapter in Weston, Florida. This physician-led project serves to motivate the communities to engage in healthy habits while socially connecting, managing stress, and walking in nature. Dr. Arancibia serves on the dietitian and nutritionist advisory committee, helping expand Peruvian food as part of the map of global diet patterns for DIET ID, a dietary assessment and management tool for physicians. She is also a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine’s CHEF Coaching Program leading the first cohorts in Spanish. Dr. Arancibia brings healthy and tasteful home cooking across the population in Peru, through culinary medicine coaching and telemedicine. Her work aims to reduce the risk factors, such as overweight, obesity, hypercholesterolemia, that lead to the most prevalent chronic diseases, and to alleviate and treat these and other conditions. Through a coalition with other physicians at the Ricardo Palma University, in Lima, Peru, she has brought nutritional medicine training to other health professionals in Peru and across Latin America, in an effort to spread this approach within all medical specialties. The path to wellness she has created has opened up a great opportunity for patients struggling to find the way to health and wellbeing.
To learn more about this movement visit : www.hvlinstitute.com