Are Doctors Nutritionists?
Diet plays an important role in health – this is clear. With
an increasing global focus on the role of nutrition in the prevention and
treatment of disease, perhaps what is more unclear is who should be providing
nutrition advice: doctors, or dietitians or nutritionists? Maybe the answer is
‘all of the above’.
Registered/Accredited Practising Dietitians and Registered
Nutritionists are university trained experts in nutrition science, armed with
all the necessary skills to translate nutrition-related evidence into
population health advice and patient care. But, with the battle against chronic
disease growing so rapidly, support and action from the health and medical
profession is also required.
Amongst a highly contested nutrition landscape, doctors are
seen by the public as one of the most trusted sources of nutrition information,
even though many have had either minimal – or even no education in
nutrition/diet in their medical training. This can bring about many challenges
for doctors: from patients google-diagnosing; to bringing questions to their
consultations seeking answers; to doctors researching information online and
having to wade through all the misinformation to find accurate nutrition
related answers. Doctors are faced with the task of tackling the barriers of
lack of nutrition education and training in the context of multiple time
constraints.
For many of these reasons, medical professionals do not
commonly advocate for nutrition advice when providing care for their patients.
With doctors being at the front line of patient care, this presents a challenge
in expert nutrition advice reaching those patients in need. Given the wealth of
research that points towards nutrition being an adjunct treatment option for
many conditions and diseases, patients are missing out on a holistic treatment
plan.
Here in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food at
Monash University, we recognise the importance of a multidisciplinary approach
to improving the health of the population through nutrition – and believe
doctors are a very important part of the conversation with patients to help
them improve their nutrition and health.
We wanted to highlight this by not only joining the
discussion about the role of medical doctors in providing nutrition advice to
patients, but suggesting strategies for overcoming the many challenges and
barriers that doctors may face.
Our approach is two-fold; both short and long term
strategies are required to engage and support to medical professionals in advocating
for nutrition as part of routine medical care, and having evidenced based
nutrition discussions with their patients.
Long term strategies need to be put in place to ensure our
future doctors and healthcare professionals have not only nutrition knowledge,
but the skills to apply this knowledge effectively in practice. Tertiary education
providers, government, professional health bodies and nutrition professionals need
to work together to ensure clear guidelines are established and implemented in
core curricula for medical and health training.
However, in the interim while our up and coming doctors are
being educated in nutrition from the beginning of their training, we also need
to upskill the current medical and health workforce in nutrition knowledge
relevant to their current fields of specialty. We believe evidenced based
continuing professional development specifically developed for the needs of
these professionals is required to be developed by leaders in the field of
nutrition. This education needs to be relevant and useful for doctors and also
developed in a format that is easily accessible.
So we feel doctors do not need to be nutritionists, but they
do need nutrition education to advocate for nutrition to be a part of routine
medical care and that the medical and nutrition profession need to work
together if we are going to have a positive impact on the health of our
population.
More information
This opinion piece has been published in Nutrition
Bulletin by Melissa Adamski, Dr Simone Gibson, Dr Michelle Leech and
Professor Helen Truby. You can access the full text article here. Melissa
Adamaski is a PhD Candidate and researcher in the Department of Nutrition,
Dietetics and Food at Monash University. Her research focuses on nutrition communication to the public.
You can follow the authors and the Department on Twitter
via:
