🚨 NEW EPISODE ALERT — Season 3, Episode 8 🎙️

The Medical Fitness Podcast
Powered by the Medical Fitness Association + the Medicine-Rehab-Fitness Institute

🎧 Guest: Dr. Jessica Matthews
🎓 Tenured Professor, Program Director – M.S. Integrative Wellness, Point Loma Nazarene University
🏥 Clinical + Research Appointment – UC San Diego Health
🏆 Former Board Member – ACLM & National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching

In this powerhouse episode, we sit down with returning guest and long-time friend of the show, Dr. Jessica Matthews — one of the nation’s top voices in integrative health, health behavior change, and lifestyle medicine.

🔊 What you’ll hear:

✅ Why most traditional healthcare education STILL misses the mark on health behavior change – and how Dr. Matthews built a nationally recognized grad program to fix it
✅ How clinicians and fitness professionals can stop “practicing in silos” and start collaborating effectively
✅ What health and wellness coaching really is — and how it can be implemented successfully into clinical care workflows
✅ The exact skill gaps that are holding many health professionals back from effectively guiding patients through sustainable lifestyle change
✅ A raw and personal look at how Dr. Matthews’ family experiences with chronic disease + recovery shape everything she teaches
✅ Behind the scenes of UC San Diego Health’s coaching integration model — plus barriers, reimbursement challenges, and scalable strategies

🧠 Whether you’re a clinician, coach, educator, or fitness pro, this episode will challenge your assumptions, sharpen your perspective, and ignite your sense of what’s possible when we get behavior change right.

🎯 Big themes:
• Communication as clinical competency
• Interdisciplinary training done right
• Coaching mindset > authority mindset
• Dosing lifestyle medicine for real-world results
• Bridging healthcare and fitness through trust + workflow alignment

🗣️ “You can’t expect clinicians to refer unless you understand their pain points—and their workflow.”
🗣️ “Lifestyle medicine DOES work—when it’s dosed appropriately and supported by the right systems.”
🗣️ “We don’t need more buzzwords. We need more collaboration.”
🗣️ “My mom went from an A1C of 13 to under 5.7—and she was given a 1% chance to live.”

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