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Although sound clinical reasons exist for emphasizing lifestyle intervention in day-to-day medical practice and national clinical guidelines advocate a multifactorial lifestyle approach to chronic disease risk reduction, studies show that physicians often fail to provide adequate counseling on lifestyle management. This observation is not entirely unexpected, given that physicians generally work in an intensely busy environment; typically do not have the time, infrastructure, or resources to focus adequate attention on lifestyle management; and receive little or no compensation for the provision of such preventative services.
In view of these another well documented barriers, it is not surprising that physicians in the United States generally tend to limit most of their attention to acute medical problems, give relatively low priority to preventative interventions, and when focusing on chronic disease risk reduction, prescribe pharmacological therapy in preference to lifestyle intervention. Regarding the ladder, because of the widespread availability of many powerful and relatively safe medication's, the value of lifestyle management per se in contemporary medical practice is often discounted by physicians, health insurance, and patients.
The widespread failure of current medical practice to reflect the recent advances in knowledge of risk factors for chronic disease and their affective modification through lifestyle intervention undoubtably result in avoidable death, disability, and human suffering. Moreover, this failure is believed to be an important contributing factor to rising healthcare costs, which in turn, is a critical driving force behind the current unsustainable trajectory of the United States fiscal deficit. Clearly, this failure remains a frustrating impediment to fulfilling the potential for improving quality of life, productivity, and longevity through healthy lifestyles while simultaneously reducing avoidable healthcare expenditures.
The aging of the United States population, high prevalence of lifestyle-related chronic diseases and risk factors for chronic disease, and rising cost of healthcare in the United States provide a sense of urgency and immediacy for finding innovative solutions and helping individuals make and adhere to meaningful lifestyle changes.
Except taken from Clinical Effectiveness of Lifestyle Health Coaching: Case Study of an Evidence-Based Program. Gordon, N.F. 2015. DOI: 10.1177/1559827615592351.
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