Get Paid for Lifestyle Medicine with Shared Medical Visits
For: Medscape
Few things frustrate physicians in clinical settings more than watching patients continue the same avoidable, unhealthy behaviors that drive the exact chronic disease we are trying to treat. We can explain how things like poor diet, absence of physical activity, or suboptimal sleep drive illness but struggle to help patients make meaningful sustainable changes.
The many reasons for this include a lack of educatioin in prescribing lifestyle behavior interventions in medical school. But any primary care physician can tell you that another enormous obstacle is time. How can a clinician possibly help each patient make lifestyle behavior changes under the constraints of a typical office visit that limits interactions to 15 minutes or less?