Behavioral Medicine: A Key to Better Health

Behavioral medicine is the science of changing our behavior, so we as individuals can stay healthy and happy as long as we can. In this course on Behavioral Medicine, you will learn about basic behavioral medicine concepts and explore how they can be applied to help people who need to change specific lifestyle behaviors to attain better health. Working with virtual patient interactions will give you a chance to test behavioral medicine interventions. You will also learn self¬-help tools based on behavioral medicine, for whatever you need to change in your own life. In this updated version of the course, you will also explore innovations in how to deliver the tools of behavioral medicine to patients in primary care and psychiatry, and what kind of content digital tools might need to include.

To help people who need to improve their health by changing their behaviors, you will learn about Motivational Interviewing (MI), a counseling style that stimulates behavior change. You will have an opportunity to test basic techniques in MI with a “virtual bartender” who has sleep problems that he is trying to solve by drinking alcohol. The following sections will focus on coping with stress, improving sleep, increasing physical activity and everyday behaviors like hand washing, safer sex and minimizing risky alcohol use.

To complete this course, you will need to spend a total of about 30-40 hours. This time covers course videos, follow-up questions to help you remember what you have learned, course reading (mostly open access scientific articles) and homework tasks. Part of the work is for you to do on your own, and part will be together with other participants in the course community.

This course is offered in collaboration with EIT Health.