Title : Nutrition Education as an Adjunct to the Future of Medicine in Embracing Traditional and Natural Approaches
Abstract:
Being that the future of medicine is at stake here, it is but immoral and unprofessional not to do anything about it. As a Nutrition Educator and a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, I can initiate how to advocate, educate, collaborate, facilitate, and finally embrace traditional and natural approaches through nutrition education.
Today, the future of medicine is unstable due to economics and disease conditions like COVID-19. Additionally, chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes mellitus, renal disease, and cardiovascular diseases with a combination of two or more conditions like the metabolic syndrome or disorders increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. The field of medicine is also burdened by social determinants of health (SODH).
What is medicine? Medicine is a substance, practice, or science used to care, treat, prevent, or cure disease, or to relieve symptoms and manage a patient's diagnosis. As substances, medicines can be chemicals, compounds, or other substances used to treat disease which can be derived from natural sources such as plants, herbs, and/or botanicals. Practice medicine can refer to practices and procedures to treat, care, or manage disease conditions and/or physical injury. This can be in combination with medical food nutrition/diet, meditation, music, and/or yoga therapies to promote health and wellbeing. Since prehistoric times, medicine has been an art with connections to the religious and philosophical beliefs of local culture. With the advent of modern science came nutrition which is a branch of medicine.
Methodically, this presentation will consist of the speaker’s more than fifty years of experiences as an RDN for a population of all ages from conception to old age, in hospital settings, child care programs, adult care communities, correctional facilities, and long term care institutions. This speaker is also the first Medical Mission RDN who cared for fifteen thousand clients/patients that saw cases of malnutrition such as obesity, failure to thrive, metabolic disorders, renal disease, and food allergies — all definite and true nutrition-related conditions which need nutrition education.
Through lecture, role-playing, group discussion, case studies, storytelling, metaphors, demonstrations, and/or a combination of multiple approaches, participants will gain insights, awareness, and hands-on experiences regarding the best practices to sharing nutrition education with their students, peers, other colleagues, benefactors, and/or providers.
Embracing traditional medicine and natural approaches is the future of medicine through nutrition education. Nutrition education is now a part of the medical curriculum/education and a positive return of investment. For the future of medicine, if we do not embrace traditional and natural approaches with nutrition education as an adjunct now, then when?
