Dear Conference Attendees of the 2nd Global Conference on Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
Dear Conference Attendees,
It is an honour and great pleasure to write a few welcome notes for the session entitled “Lifestyle approaches to prevent and manage disabilities”.
Over the last few decades, there has been an explosion in chronic lifestyle related diseases with a proportional increase in disability. It is not commonly appreciated and taught that many of these conditions are curable by making healthy lifestyle changes. There are many aspects of lifestyle such as diet, exercise, sleep hygiene and screen time over which an individual a lot of control. Good news is that it is never too late - many chronic disabling conditions are not just preventable, but also treatable, with cure or significant reversal / remission achieved through lifestyle changes.
After considering general principles of lifestyle medicine, the author will consider the available evidence for lifestyle management in a few common disabling conditions including osteoarthritis, dementia, degenerative brain diseases, neuropathies, cancer, metabolic diseases, etc.
I hope that you would benefit in many ways from this keynote lecture, including:
- Improving your own health by adopting the right lifestyle!
- Your patients would have already done some research in this area! You can counsel them better than Dr Google!
- You can utilise these interventions along with other conventional approaches. For instance:
- Weight loss before joint replacement to minimize the morbidity and improve the life of the prosthesis
- Good lifestyle to improve the quality of life following coronary interventions
- Lifestyle modifications before and after cancer treatments to improve QoL, reduce stress & depression.