MedPage Today: Lifestyle Medicine Meets Obamacare

In this video, long-time proponent Dean Ornish, MD, provides a perspective on how lifestyle medicine and the Ornish Lifestyle Medicine program (Intensive Cardiac Rehabilitation) might find its place in the changing healthcare landscape.

“Simple changes can make such a powerful difference” – Dr. Dean Ornish

Ornish says:

We all know that lifestyle factors play a role in helping to prevent disease. But lifestyle medicine is about using lifestyle interventions to treat disease, and often to reverse it, either in combinations with drugs and surgery, or often as an alternative to them.

You know, we tend to think of advances in medicine as being a new drug, a new laser, or something really high-tech and expensive. And we often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we and our patients make in our lives each day — like what we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise we get, and, perhaps most important, how much love and support we have — that these simple changes can make such a powerful difference, but they often do.