Lifestyle Medicine and Thermal Medicine

Abstract

In the 2013 the concept of Thermal Medicine was declared in the Congress of St Petersburg, introducing a new era that united the Balneotherapy and Education to improve the healthy life expectancy of the population. Over the last decades society has increasingly become more aware of the impact of a healthy lifestyle in prevention. Individuals are starting to understand that a healthy lifestyle is not a selfish attitude but an altruistic one, as it reduces the future impact on your family and society. The potential impact of Thermal Clinics in this field is huge. As Doctors, our mission is to inform and educate patients on how to design a healthy lifestyle. As Thermal Clinics, we have all the tools to create the biggest network of Health Schools, designing ongoing education programs with concentrated kick-off and follow up weeks. Our goal should be to unite Balneotherapy with Lifestyle Medicine, a branch of evidence-based medicine in which integral lifestyle changes are used (including nutrition, physical activity, stress management, social support and environmental exposures) to prevent, treat and reverse the progression of chronic diseases by addressing their underlying causes. Lifestyle Medicine interventions include health risk assessments, advice on behavioral changes that affect health, and the clinical application of lifestyle modifications. Lifestyle medicine is an interdisciplinary field of internal medicine, psychosocial and neuroscience, public and environmental health, and biology. The key principles of Lifestyle Medicine include prevention strategies that address lifestyle habits, underlying biological causes and the pathophysiologies common to Lifestyle Related Illnesses (eg, systemic inflammation, dysregulated stress disorder, metabolic dysfunction, etc.). As such, Lifestyle Medicine is an expanded form of treatment that helps unite the best aspects of public health and conventional clinical medicine. We believe that Lifestyle Medicine is of great interest to Thermal Clinic patients and therefore its educational programs should be introduced as part of the thermal. This year the Spanish Society of Lifestyle Medicine was founded with the Spanish Society of Medical Hydrology as a founding member.