Exercise Is Medicine (EIM), a new discipline within medicine, can help in doing away with medications for some diseases while reducing the dosage for several others, an expert has stated.
EIM is a concept where exercise is prescribed as medicine based on the FITT Principle - frequency, intensity, type and time.
“Though medication cannot be substituted  completely, we can reduce the dose in many cases and completely discontinue it for conditions such as high cholesterol,” Dr Husam Rezeq, public health specialist at Aspetar, told Gulf Times.
“There are several cases where we could reduce the dosage for hypertension. People who used to take 25-30mg of medicine for hypertension, are able to control their blood pressure by using just 5-10mg now,” he explained.
Aspetar is the only well-established centre for EIM in the Middle East  as well as the only approved licensed centre in the region. The centre has treated about 700 patients so far.
Dr Rezeq cautioned that exercise is not a substitute for medication. But what EIM aims to do is to lower the dosage significantly, especially the medication for chronic diseases, provided exercise is regular.
“Through exercise, the disease level gets reduced. This is a case of better management of diseases and better prevention as people can combine exercises and medication. This can be especially applicable in the case of diseases such diabetes and hypertension where the dosage of the medicine can be brought down and medication for cholesterol can be fully stopped.”
The official pointed out that EIM provides an individually-tailored exercise pattern. “It is very important to design an exercise pattern for each individual. Based on the patient capabilities such as medical and fitness level, body mass index and other criteria, they have to exercise. We tailor an exercise programme individually and there are different exercises for different people,” he said.
“We provide the patients a programme for three months of supervised classes wherein we monitor their training and teach them about  proper instruments, time, frequency and the mode of exercise.  After three months we discharge them with a prescription that they need to undertake at home. We follow up with them every three months,” Dr Rezeq added.
The exercise schedule starts with five to ten minutes per day with a progression plan. “Sometimes we continue the same pattern for four to six weeks according to the capability of the patient. The patients might even reach the conditioning stage after several weeks. Usually we start an exercise for 10-15 minutes and gradually increase it to 30 minutes.”
“We have a high success rate as many patients who could not even walk, got cured completely. On the contrary, we have patients who were provided all the facilities but did not stick to the programme and could not progress,” he added.