Like any developing country, health care providers in the Philippines are not equipped to implement lifestyle intervention as the primary approach to these chronic conditions despite the repeated emphasis on its role in the clinical practice guidelines. This gap is seemingly due to the long-overdue demand to address the inadequacy of lifestyle medicine education in both medical and interprofessional curricula resulting in poor skills and confidence among prospective health care providers to deliver effective lifestyle intervention to patients. Advancing the early initiatives in integrating lifestyle medicine across all levels of medical education and interprofessional training through various initiated methodologies is therefore proposed as an essential intervention to address the inevitably growing burden. This review explores how socioeconomic factors can influence the development and implementation of lifestyle medicine education in response to the call for medical and interprofessional curricula reformation. Information on the existing lifestyle medicine education programs initiated by several organizations and training institutions that training institutions can adopt in the Philippines will also be provided.

The primary initiatives on this effort showed positive outcomes however, local research on this field is extremely limited to non-existent thus, much work remains to be done. Keywords: lifestyle medicine education, lifestyle medicine continuing education, lifestyle therapy, lifestyle interventions The close association of lifestyle with the pathogenesis of chronic diseases has been established since early times (Bodai et al., 2018).

Philippine medical conferences 2016