LivingWell: Taking control of your health through lifestyle changes![]() Did you know that 80-90% of chronic diseases and their consequences are preventable? This includes heart attack, stroke, high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and dementia. In the vast majority of cases these diseases are caused by what we’re doing to our bodies, in other words, our lifestyle. If these are the result of our lifestyle then a change in our lifestyle habits can treat and often reverse them completely. Welcome to Living Well. In these articles we’ll explore what you can do to live life free of the most common diseases. Diseases that I’ve spent the past 30 years of my medical career treating. Hi, I’m Dr. Dan Smithson and I am dual-board certified as a Family Physician and as a Lifestyle Medicine Physician. I always wanted to become a doctor and practice in a small community. I also enjoy teaching people what they can do to live happier and healthier lives and thought the two disciplines could go hand-in-hand. When I had the opportunity to come to Baker City 24 years ago I thought it was the perfect fit. Here I’ve enjoyed caring for patients from delivery though the end of life. I love what I’ve been able to do. However, the type of medicine in which I trained emphasized seeing as many people as possible in short office visits, where pills and procedures are used to treat illness. While that may work well for acute problems like sore throats, tummy-bugs and ingrown toenails, it doesn’t work so well for more chronic issues like high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol. For these, we need more time. Time to teach what the underlying causes are and ways to intervene and even reverse them. Instead, we often treat the chronic issues the same way we treat acute problems, with pills and procedures. Unfortunately, pills don’t do a very good job at treating chronic illness, they just control the disease. There is a big difference between controlling a problem and actually treating the underlying cause and even reversing the disease altogether. To treat and reverse chronic issues we need to get to the root cause and change what it was that created the disease in the first place. That’s where Lifestyle Medicine, the newest of the medical specialties comes in. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine defines this specialty as one that “uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to treat chronic conditions including, but not limited to, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. Lifestyle medicine certified clinicians are trained to apply evidence-based, whole-person, prescriptive lifestyle change to treat and, when used intensively, often reverse such conditions. Applying the six pillars of lifestyle medicine—a whole-food plant-predominant eating pattern, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, avoidance of risky substances, and positive social connections—also provides effective prevention for these conditions.” I want to share this important information with as many people in our community as possible. That is why I’m excited to author this series of articles which I’ll share with you each month. I hope you’ll find them informative. More importantly, however, I hope you’ll find them motivating and even life-changing. After all, what good is knowledge if it doesn’t result in some type of transformation. As Henry Ford said: “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got”. In Living Well you will learn the underlying causes of the most common chronic illness, many of which I suspect you are being treated for right now. We’ll then explore realistic changes that you can make to treat, and often even reverse, your disease. I don’t know anyone who isn’t interested in cutting down or even coming off of their medication. So, are you ready to learn more? Let’s go! Join me next month to start your journey toward Living Well.
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