Lifestyle Medicine. Closing Research, Practice, and Knowledge Gaps

This book represents the third in a series of Springer textbooks on Lifestyle Medicine by Dr. Mechanick and Dr. Kushner. The first book focused on theory and practice concepts. The second book focused on implementation with a specific tactic of building a lifestyle medicine center. This third book focuses on scientific evidence to close research gaps, knowledge gaps, and practice gaps. The general intent is to imbue the field of lifestyle medicine with scientific evidence. The other intent is to continue advancing a culture of preventive care for chronic disease using lifestyle medicine, but again through a tactic of emphasizing science, evidence, and critical thinking.

Lifestyle Medicine: Closing Research, Practice, and Knowledge Gaps is organized into three sections. In the first section, driver-based chronic disease models and other elements that pertain to lifestyle medicine are explored in terms of current levels of scientific substantiation. In the second section, educational modalities are presented that can improve awareness of scientific and experiential knowledge by healthcare professionals. Topics include innovative teaching models, web-based activities, training and accreditation programs, and certification exams. In the third section, a variety of clinical scenarios are presented to highlight practice gaps – implementation issues where there is inadequate clinical action despite an awareness of the pertinent knowledge. The topics span critical domains that must be addressed so that lifestyle medicine can lead to favorable outcomes in people and populations at risk. These domains include: alcohol and substance abuse, colitis, brain health, environmental risk, pharmacotherapy de-escalation, routine change, socioeconomics, transculturalization, advanced analytics, home cardiac rehabilitation, digital twin technology, and a highly referenced discussion of the lifestyle medicine ecosystem and infrastructure. Care is taken to provide not only theoretical foundations but also case studies, where appropriate, to emphasize critical aspects.

In conclusion, this third book on Lifestyle Medicine will complement the previous two Springer books and define a compendium of resources necessary for anyone interested in this field.