Prescribing more than just medicine, these Nelson doctors are using their knowledge to prescribe lifestyle improvements that improve health. And they’re taking their message from their clinics to the web as Frank Nelson finds out.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Turns out there’s more than a grain of truth in that well-worn rhyme though it obviously takes more than just one gala or granny smith.
According to Nelson physicians Marissa Kelaher and Taisia Cech, a well-balanced, preferably plant-focused, diet is certainly one of the keys to staying healthy.
However, the pair also promote other critical elements making up a healthy lifestyle – exercise, sleep, managing stress, positive social connections, and avoiding risky behaviour like smoking or taking drugs.
Marissa and Taisia are on a mission to educate and encourage people to adopt all six core wellness values which they say will enable them to live healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives.
It’s a message they are already spreading through their clinics in Nelson and via Taisia’s website, ‘The Healthstyle Doctor’ and Marissa’s ‘The Simplicity Doctor’; and next month they plan to launch a new, dedicated lifestyle website to attract a broader – potentially worldwide – audience.
“We’re the only two doctors doing lifestyle medicine consults in Nelson,” says Marissa, who thinks there are probably only a handful of others around the country. “We’re fairly few and far between.”
And although they are following a path less travelled by the vast majority of GPs, they stress that their passion for building healthy lifestyles does not mean turning their backs on mainstream medicine.
On the contrary, they regard lifestyle medicine as complementary to conventional primary care, not a replacement. And for certain acute conditions, such as severe mental illness, major infections or heart attacks, they readily agree the best treatment will likely be standard medication or surgery.
However, Marissa cites estimates that up to 80 percent of chronic illness and premature deaths in developed nations, along with around 70 percent of GP visits, are due to lifestyle-related illness.
“Lifestyle medicine is ‘slow medicine’ that aims to prevent and treat issues before they get to the serious/acute stage, and this is where we see its main role and benefit,” she said.
“It’s much faster to write a prescription than it is to sit and talk to someone about their stress or their lifestyle or their diet. And although doctors would fully support lifestyle as a part of health, sadly our current system just doesn’t provide the training or even time to do this most of the time.”
She says diabetes is a good example of a fast-growing and expensive-to-treat disease in New Zealand “(which) is largely preventable, and can be vastly improved or even reversed with lifestyle changes.”
Taisia says lifestyle medicine uses a holistic approach “incorporating health promotion, disease prevention and chronic disease management.”
The “prevention is better than cure” mantra shines through on her website which quotes the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Or in other words, a protective fence (built using sturdy lifestyle choices) at the top of the cliff is a better option than an ambulance picking up broken bodies at the bottom.
Though she was born in Christchurch and largely grew up in St Arnaud, Taisia Cech’s name hints at some European origins … Czechoslovakia and Germany on her father’s side, and a first name derived from the Russian “Anastasia”. As a young girl she lived for a year in Germany.
However, it was while boarding at Nelson College for Girls that she first glimpsed the powerful role lifestyle and diet could play as they helped alleviate her own chronic fatigue and irritable bowel health issues.
She spent six years at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, followed by three years hospital training in Wellington and one in Nelson, plus an additional three-year GP training programme in rural Nelson.
Now in her mid-30s and married with two young boys, Taisia is also certified by the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine and has a certificate in plant-based nutrition.
“I think I probably only had about three or fours of nutrition in medical school,” she said. “You learn so much pharmacology and physiology … but not about the basics of exercise, sleep, stress and nutrition.”
While continuing to work as a GP, Taisia runs her own business, The Healthstyle Doctor, working through her website and holding video consultations while also seeing patients at her clinic on Church Street.
Marissa’s background is even more exotic than Taisia’s. She was born in British Columbia to a Canadian mother and an English father, and spent her first 18 months living in a log cabin close to the Rocky Mountains. “My parents were quite alternative,” she says.
The family moved to New Zealand and finally settled in Golden Bay where Marissa’s education was split between home schooling and Collingwood Area School.
She learned classical piano and attended a performing arts school in Auckland for a year before volunteer work in Fiji and her love of science drew her towards a career in medicine.
After six years of study at Otago and two years as a house surgeon at Nelson Hospital, her career was put on hold for about four years while she, husband Douglas and his 11-year-old son, travelled overseas. They now have two more children aged seven and 10.
Back in Nelson, Marissa, 42, completed her GP training and for the past decade or so has been working here in general practice. During that time she has increasingly focused on lifestyle medicine and completed additional training courses.
Today she continues to work as a GP but also handles separate lifestyle appointments at the practice. “I found it quite hard to incorporate that into the 15 minutes you get with a GP consult,” she said.
She also promotes lifestyle medicine on social media and says the medical profession is gradually becoming more accepting of this new and different specialty. “It’s all very evidence-based, very sensible. It’s not fringe medicine at all.”
Marissa thinks it will probably take years for the lifestyle approach to become widely accepted, but she’s encouraged by the “huge amount of interest” already shown by professional colleagues.
She was excited to meet Taisia and find someone equally passionate about lifestyle medicine who shares the same goal of prescribing lifestyle improvements -- rather than medication -- to more and more people, around the country and beyond.
The pair hope the new online health course they’re launching next month (yourlifestylemedics.com) will help them achieve that goal.
For those new to lifestyle medicine the website could be primarily an education tool; for those more familiar with the topic but who feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of (sometimes conflicting) information, the site should provide guidance, coaching and motivation.
A broad online menu may cover everything from advice on how to change behaviour and habits, to general tips about how to eat well and keep fit on a limited budget. The site will also act as a supportive community resource by enabling people to share information and experiences.
Eventually, says Marissa, they would like to tweak the website to cater for a completely new market -- healthcare professionals -- as another way of helping weave together the separate strands of lifestyle and mainstream medicine.
