HAZARD, Ky. (WYMT) – Hazard ARH has launched a lifestyle medicine service line aimed to help patients make sustainable, everyday changes to improve their health.
The new approach addresses chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease through daily habits rather than traditional medical interventions.
“Lifestyle medicine is a branch of medicine which uses everyday therapeutic lifestyle interventions to prevent, treat, and even reverse chronic disease such as diabetes, high blood pressure, other heart disease, obesity,” said Allie Davidson, nurse practitioner and clinical service line director for lifestyle medicine at Hazard ARH.
Davidson said this approach differs from typical medical visits by emphasizing lifestyle changes over pharmaceutical treatments.
“We focus on everyday lifestyle interventions to create small habits that we continue to build on to improve your lifestyle, rather than focusing on medication or further tests and exams,” Davidson said.
The lifestyle medicine clinic operates as a separate service embedded within the Hazard clinic and is accepting adult patients. No referral is required, though providers work with patient’s primary care providers to align care. Patients can come in with specific goals or simply for guidance on where to start.
“For example, if we want to improve your hemoglobin A1C for diabetes, that’s going to be our goal. And I’m going to tailor our plan of care for that goal. If your goal is to improve your sleep and your energy, we can talk about ways in which we want to do that and set those habits and hope to help you reach those goals,” Davidson said. “We want to make sure we’re creating sustainable lifelong changes to improve your health and wellness,” Davidson said.
Hazard ARH will host an official ribbon cutting for the lifestyle medicine clinic on Jan. 22.
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