Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

From the British Journal of Sports Medicine, an editorial: “Exercise is medicine and physicians need to prescribe it!”

Dr Robert Sallis, who practices in the USA, goes so far as to advocate a merger between the fitness and healthcare industries in this literal call to action. He quotes figures which show that sedentary patients cost $1500 a year more to care for than active patients, and (in a cry which will seem familiar to hypnotherapists and other advocates of nonmedical interventions), says, “If we had a pill that conferred all the confirmed health benefits of exercise, would we not do everything humanly possible to see to it that everyone had access to this wonder drug? Would it not be the most prescribed pill in the history of mankind? ….[M]ainstream medicine has mostly ignored research on the exercise pill. Instead, the healthcare system as it exists currently is completely enamoured with procedures and pharmaceuticals, while paying little more than lip service to prevention.”

As I mentioned in my post on the “blue prescription“, New Zealand doctors have been prescribing the “exercise pill”, as Sallis calls it, for more than 10 years. It’s known here as a “green prescription”.

The big problem with prescribing exercise, of course, is compliance. It’s pretty much universally known that exercise is good for you, and yet we don’t do it. (BEGIN SHAMELESS PLUG MODE That’s why I created my Eager to Exercise hypnotherapy track, which is available as an individual MP3 download for $3 NZD, as part of my Healthy Lifestyle CD or on the CD accompanying my book Changing Health Behaviours. END SHAMELESS PLUG MODE)

I’m delighted to see calls for integrating medical health care with other health-related disciplines. I’d love to see more doctors referring people off not only to dieticians and personal trainers, but also meditation teachers and, of course, hypnotherapists. The whole “my therapy is better than your therapy” attitude just has to change – from all sides – for health care to improve. Of course, this will require high professional, educational and scientific standards from non-medical health workers; mutual respect; and lots of communication.

Technorati Tags: exercise, health, medicine, sports medicine, non-drug intervention, green prescription, motivation, healthcare

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