Information for Clinicians

Collaborative evidence-based Lifestyle Medicine provides high quality clinical support to help manage your patient’s chronic disease.

Lifestyle Medicine recognises the enormous impact that daily habits and actions can have on short and long-term health and quality of life. It recognises the importance and difficulties of behavioural change and the need to develop new goals and habits.

Our mission is to complement the great care you are providing for your patients. Through Lifestyle Medicine intervention programs, we educate, coach and help support them to achieve their wellness goals so they can live their best lives.

As medical practitioners, we know the significance of lifestyle factors in disease prevention.

  • Why Refer?

    We can provide you and your patient with the Lifestyle Medicine resources & supportive care needed to help address the root cause of your patient’s chronic disease.

    The need for medicines and surgeries may be reduced when our whole-person approach to health is used intensively.

  • Interdisciplinary Support

    Most chronically ill patients need additional care and coaching with their physical, emotional and social health, and we are here to help support them.

  • Our Approach

    We use an evidence-based Lifestyle Medicine approach to healing to address the underlying lifestyle causes of many diseases rather than just the symptoms.

  • Great News

    Significant studies over the past 50 years have shown that healthy lifestyle choices can prevent up to 80% of mortality* and 80% of morbidity from chronic disease,** and healthy lifestyle adherence provides not only more life but better quality of life.***

  • Extend Your Care

    A referral to the ELIA Lifestyle Medicine Centre can help extend your excellent care and help transform the lives of your patient with the support and lifestyle medicine coaching we provide.

What is Lifestyle Medicine?

It’s the use of evidence-based therapeutic interventions, including:

  1. Whole food plant-based diet

  2. Regular physical activity

  3. Restorative sleep

  4. Stress Management

  5. Avoidance of risky substances

  6. Positive social connections

as a primary modality, delivered by clinicians trained and certified in this speciality, to prevent, treat and when used intensively, can remit chronic diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, cancer and obesity - American College of Lifestyle Medicine.

“It challenges many longstanding notions about the role of doctor and patient in maintaining the health of individuals and families and recognises that a patient must be an active participant in, rather than a passive recipient of treatment.”
— Randall Pearce commenting on The State of Self-Care in Australia report 2018

Lifestyle Medicine dates to Hippocrates as a strong advocate for a healthy diet and physical exercise to prevent disease. However, it has only recently been officially recognised in the medical field. Lifestyle Medicine models of care are widely used in the UK and USA, including the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Loma Linda University Hospital. They are now starting to gain traction in Australia.

The ELIA Lifestyle Medicine Centre at Sydney Adventist Hospital will compliment the great care clinicians are providing their patients.

References:

* Danaei, etal (2009). The Preventable Causes of Death in the United States: Comparative Risk Assessment of Dietary, Lifestyle, and Metabolic Risk Factors. PLoS Medicine, [online] 6(4), p.e1000058. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000058.)

** Ford, E. S., et al (2009). Healthy living is the best revenge: findings from the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition-Potsdam study. Archives of internal medicine, 169(15), 1355–1362. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinternmed.2009.237

*** Li, Y., et al. (2020). Healthy lifestyle and life expectancy free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: prospective cohort study. BMJ, [online] 368. doi:10.1136/bmj.l6669.