Implementation of the lifestyle medicine discipline in the mandatory curriculum at USP - Bauru

Abstract

Introduction: Lifestyle medicine aims to promote and maintain healthy lifestyle habits leading to the prevention, reversal and reduction of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs), mainly cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and different types of cancer. Objectives: To structure a space in the medical course that addresses the pillars of lifestyle medicine and its inclusion in its pedagogical project in a curricular way. Methods: Information was collected in a grid and the fourth year was chosen, in the first semester the space where students would enter a metabolism module, after initial discussion of the course coordination and module coordination it was decided to keep it in parallel in the same module lifestyle medicine classes that were taught every Wednesday afternoon, totaling a final workload of 32 hours. In the introductory class, an exploratory questionnaire that was prepared in-house was handed out. After the presentations, an official opening with the participation of a founding member of the Brazilian College of Lifestyle Medicine. The students were divided into groups. Each group dealt with a theme that was exposed, with each theme having a dynamic. So we started with: 1. Health wheel and medical self-care with dynamics of the wheel itself: 2. food and culinary medicine – external dynamics with the entire group; 3. sleep - after an initial survey of how many hours each student slept, we discussed sleep disorders and approaches and links with chronic diseases; 4. connections and homework assignments that asked you to turn in a deep connection and a letter to yourself in the future, 5. Mental health and how we deal with stress: we talked about  and  students completed self-assessment questionnaires; 6. Physical Activity: they read and talked in a flipped room with a physical educator, 7. Toxic: students were evaluated and discussed the topics of tobacco and alcohol. Results: 57 students regularly enrolled in the fourth year participated. Only 37% of students had already heard of the topic. Of these, only 8% knew the pillars. After the course, the same questions were asked and there was a 76% increase in results. Conclusions: It is of fundamental importance for the management of chronic diseases that doctors are trained with the technical knowledge to deal with the prescription of lifestyle habits.