A Scholarly Concentration is an optional experience that complements the core medical school curriculum and empowers students to delve into topics of personal interest such as urban medicine and health care disparities, business of medicine, public health, quality and innovation in health care and more. To help students decide if a concentration topic is the right fit, concentration co-directors share the inside scoop—from why they got involved in the concentration to how a specific topic can help students reach their goals.
Topic: Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Location: Muncie
Co-Directors: Larry Fromm, PhD, and Michael Litt, PhD
How is this concentration beneficial to a student’s personal and professional goals?
Students will learn how to help patients implement evidence-based lifestyle choices, which can lead to better health outcomes. Students can ultimately incorporate some of these ideas into their patient care in their future medical practice.
What are the special resources and expertise on this concentration’s home campus?
One of the resources in Muncie related to health promotion and disease prevention is the Healthy Lifestyle Center (HLC). At HLC, interprofessional teams with expertise in areas including nutrition, exercise, mental/behavioral health counseling, social work, and other health care professions evaluate health needs of patients, educate patients on how lifestyle decisions affect health and help patients design plans to meet goals for health. Another resource is the Ball State Clinical Exercise Physiology (CEP) Program. The CEP Program performs comprehensive health and fitness assessments and, based on results, designs programs to improve health.
During the Lifestyle Medicine elective, students will participate in activities at HLC and CEP Program. In the CEPLab, students will participate in comprehensive physical fitness testing/assessment, and develop comprehensive lifestyle modification prescriptions based upon testing results. Students can be their own test subject in the CEP Lab. At the HLC, students will work with an interprofessional team to improve health outcomes of patients. At the conclusion, students will develop a short research or programming proposal aimed at either improving access to primary care or infusion of lifestyle medicine into the primary care environment. This proposal can be used as the basis for future scholarly concentration research.
You provided some examples of potential projects for this concentration. Can you also give some more details and examples of what one or two different projects could look like?
Projects might evaluate an outcome of patients participating in some particular lifestyle program or intervention.
