Fitness Training Complements Primary Medicine

(This article is designed to give insight to other health care professionals)

Fitness training complements your practice as well as your patients. Shores Medical, P.A. Places “prevention” on top for one of its main goals. Looking good, feeling good and being “at goal” is our motto. If this is practiced and preached on a daily basis your patients will love you because they begin to feel better. Everyone wants to feel well and subsequently look well so they can enjoy life to its max. They certainly deserve this after years of having worked hard. Why shouldn’t they want to enjoy life now? This is hard if they are overweight as their joints have now begun to significantly hurt and often their blood sugar and blood pressure are now bouncing around. Soon they find their appointment books filling up with doctor appointments.

Over this past year, I’ve had the opportunity to integrate my practice with fitness training and God has blessed me with two wonderful fitness trainers and I mean they are tops. That is one of the best decisions I could have made, as it is a win-win situation. This not only complements the scope of my practice but it will enhance the practice’s income as well in this day and age of decreasing revenues. Having fitness training immediately available to your patients greatly enhances a physician’s ability to reinforce how important exercise and fitness is to their patients. They hear you lecture them and carry on the dialogue in their exam room but if entered into the program shortly thereafter, fitness training quickly implements this vision into a reality.

Once patients receive an initial comprehensive evaluation by the trainer during their first hourly visit, then they are instructed to return for all other visits in appropriate exercise clothes. They then begin working with stretching (which greatly enhances their abilities for ADL such as tying their shoes, bending over to get things, et cetera) and then work to increase their endurance with small to medium weights.

This fitness program will begin with your prescripted recommendation for how many times a week and the number of weeks the patient is to continue. The appropriate medical coding is documented on the prescription as well, such as DJD of the hips and knees, hypertension, diabetes, morbid obesity. Just before the prescripted time runs out, the patient will return to their physician for them to determine and document how fitness has helped them with very specific examples. Many of them have often met their goals at 12 weeks but there are some that need to be extended further. A simple questionnaire can be given to the patients that will explicitly outline to you what has been accomplished by the patients. A typical example of what I see at a follow-up visit is the following, I’ll say, “Joe, what kind of things you tell me that will make me believe fitness training has helped you?” Frequently I will have patients say, ”well, doc, before I began training I couldn’t even get my foot up on my thigh to tie my shoestring and now look at me.” The patient quickly (often even quicker than I can) brings their leg up to a 90 degree angle on their thigh. I’ll also hear, “you know I feel so much stronger now I can stay up longer, I can do more things, I can do all my yard work without getting out of breath anymore.” If additional time is needed to complete the desired goals, I will extend the patient at that time with another prescription and document why.

Once graduated, these patients find out for the first time in their life they are motivated to get involved in community programs or sign up in a local gym and discuss their new goals with a trainer there, now at their cost, which generally is at a nominal fee. The reason why is that they have ingrained some major behavioral changes to include new dietary habits. What I’ve seen as an end result is that initial fitness training in a medical environment gives the patients confidence and the desire to become a self-starter!

I would be most happy to be a reference source for you when you decide to implement fitness training into your practice. Please feel free to call or write at the above address or phone number at any time.

Sincerely,