Medical scientists are searching relentlessly for more effective ways to prevent or cure cancer, heart disease, and many other serious chronic diseases. While hoping for breakthroughs that will simply make these life-threatening problems go away, many of us overlook the important role that our own behavior plays in whether we stay healthy, get sick, or die young.
Our physical health depends to a great extent on our own health behaviors — whether, for instance, we stop smoking, get enough exercise, stick to a healthy diet, and maintain our mental health.
Behavioral medicine is the multidisciplinary field of scientific research, clinical practice, and public health policy analysis that focuses on our health behaviors and on psychological problems such as stress and depression that can help to cause, prevent, worsen, or improve chronic diseases.
Some of our health behaviors can be difficult to change, and even when we are successful, we can backslide. Too many of us have stopped smoking, lost weight, started to exercise, or overcome depression, but only temporarily.
Behavioral medicine researchers have made steady advances in recent years in efforts to develop more effective interventions for risky health behaviors and for psychosocial problems like stress. But they have not made enough progress toward the field's ultimate goals.
One of these goals is to prove that chronic diseases can be prevented by helping people to improve their health behaviors and overcome their stress, depression, or other psychological problems. Another is to prove that health behavior interventions can help people who already have chronic diseases to live longer and better lives.
These are very challenging goals — so challenging, in fact, that it will take many scientists working together over many years to achieve them.
Four of the leading behavioral medicine research organizations in the United States recently decided to team up to accelerate progress toward these goals.
The Founding Conference of the Behavioral Medicine Research Council (BMRC) was held in Washington DC on December 10–11, 2018. The BMRC is a joint committee of the Society for Behavioral Medicine (SBM), the American Psychosomatic Society (APS), the Society for Health Psychology (SfHP), and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research (ABMR).
The BMRC's mission is to promote strategic goals for behavioral medicine. These are ambitious, long-term goals whose achievement depends on concerted and persistent efforts by well-organized multidisciplinary research networks. These efforts are designed to produce stronger research evidence to convince the gatekeepers of health care services to embrace evidence-based behavioral interventions.
The Founding Conference brought together the distinguished scientists who have been appointed to the BMRC with leaders of the founding organizations; stakeholders and advisors from the research community; representatives from major funding agencies and other organizations including the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Administration, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the International Behavioural Trials Network; and the Editors-in-Chief of several leading journals in health psychology and behavioral medicine.
A special report on the BMRC was recently published in Health Psychology. It concludes that the BMRC will lead the way in efforts to overcome behavioral medicine's biggest challenges.
If successful, these efforts will help to transform chronic disease prevention and care.
Citation
- Freedland, K. E. (2019). The Behavioral Medicine Research Council: Its origins, mission, and methods. Health Psychology, 38(4), 277–289. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hea0000731
Note: This article is in the Health Psychology & Medicine topic area. View more articles in the Health Psychology & Medicine topic area.