Preventive Medicine 2020 Online brought together leaders from medicine and public health to examine the most pressing issues in healthcare today, and how the Nation’s healthcare system can be transformed around prevention. This virtual meeting offered high-quality medical education programming, networking opportunities, and the recognition of the best in the profession.

The meeting was organized around critical topics including innovations in community health, public health policy, evidence and practice, health systems transformation and lifestyle medicine. Each meeting day was themed around two critical topics, with distinct sessions addressing shared themes in the practice of prevention.

 

Preventive Medicine 2020 Online focused on big, bold, upstream ideas and the people, places, and programs that are making them a reality today. Transformation is only possible with a clear vision, audacious goals, an innovative mindset, and the will to implement new policy and practice, honestly evaluate change, and engage stakeholders at every level.

The rapid trajectory of the obesity epidemic has shifted the primary focus of many healthcare providers from overall health and wellbeing to largely reducing weight and BMI numbers, through medications, surgical procedures, and sometimes excessively restrictive, and potentially unhealthy, dietary weight loss programs, assuming that the two are synonymous. Today, we too will discuss nutrition and exercise, two important categories of Lifestyle Medicine, but present a patient-friendly, stigma-reducing approach that is an evidence-based alternative to standard advice of ‘eat less and move more’, where the focus shifts to prioritizing health gain, self-acceptance, and improvements in functional mobility, rather than weight loss alone.

• Define weight stigma and bias, and some of the negative effects it may have on one’s health.
• Understand how healthcare systems can contribute to weight stigma and bias, and some of the negative effects this may have on one’s health.
• Recognize the multifactorial influences to determining a person’s weight, and the relatively low success with most interventions to significantly and sustainably reduce body weight through caloric restriction.
• Appreciate some alternative models to help the patient in a larger body improve their mental and physical health, beyond recommending weight loss, and take-away some specific recommendations to address chronic diseases with nutrition and exercise, that can improve health in the absence of weight loss.
• Prioritize exercise/physical activity as medicine and recognize the metabolic benefits of movement beyond energy balance, and how to help all patients safely enjoy movement.

Dr. Karen Studer, MD, MBA, MPH, FACPM

Mr. Brad Biskup, PA-C, MHS, MA, diplACLM

Dr. Renae Thomas, MD