What if lifestyle medicine could be seamlessly integrated into community care—designed with patients, not just for them?
In this episode of LM in Motion, host Dawson Myers sits down with Pamela Perepelitsky, incoming third-year medical student at Chicago Medical School, to explore how she co-founded a lifestyle medicine service within a student-run interprofessional community clinic.
Serving uninsured patients in Lake County, Illinois, this initiative goes beyond education—embedding lifestyle medicine directly into clinic workflows through personalized, culturally relevant tools and resources.
Together, they walk through:
How patient needs and data shaped the foundation of the program
What it took to design and launch a lifestyle medicine service from scratch
The process of building clinic workflows, resource kits, and volunteer protocols
Challenges like coordination, translation, and maintaining clinic flow
Why culturally tailored care is essential to meaningful behavior change
Practical steps for replicating this model in other community settings
This episode highlights the power of starting small, listening deeply, and building solutions alongside the communities you serve. It’s a real-world example of how lifestyle medicine can advance health equity while empowering both patients and future clinicians.
🎧 Whether you’re a trainee, educator, or clinician, you’ll walk away with actionable insights for integrating lifestyle medicine into community-based care.
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The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) is the medical professional society for physicians and other professionals dedicated to clinical and worksite practice of lifestyle medicine as the foundation of a transformed and sustainable healthcare system. Lifestyle medicine is a medical specialty that uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to treat chronic conditions including, but not limited to, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.
Lifestyle medicine-certified clinicians are trained to apply evidence-based, whole-person, prescriptive lifestyle change to treat and, when used intensively, often reverse such conditions. Applying the six pillars of lifestyle medicine—a whole-food, plant-predominant eating pattern, physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, avoidance of risky substances, and positive social connections—also provides effective prevention for these conditions.
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