Scientific studies over the last several decades have established that exercise is a powerful medicine for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease. The evidence that exercise should be part of standard medical management is documented in the published research that we and others have conducted. The rationale for establishing The Centre for STRONG Medicine lay in the emerging evidence base for the use of exercise not only in ageing, but also in the treatment of specific diseases and geriatric syndromes. The Centre serves to address the overlap among chronic diseases, disuse and ageing, a complicated series of inter-relationships for which exercise is often the only available current therapy. Despite 50 years of research demonstrating preventive and therapeutic benefit, exercise is still not widely or effectively applied in mainstream medical practice. This is likely due to the fact that it is not part of the core curriculum for medical students at virtually any medical schools in the world. There are few health care professionals who have combined knowledge of medicine, geriatrics, and exercise physiology. This breadth of knowledge is critical for the full integration of these ideas into a patients medical management. In addition, medical reimbursement for exercise treatment, when available, has traditionally been disease-specific (e.g. cardiac or pulmonary rehabilitation) and time-limited (6-12 weeks). Such concepts have little utility when applied to the most common geriatric indication for exercise, frailty itself, which is neither disease or organ specific, nor time-limited. In using exercise as a specific medicine its use needs to be conceptualised as a drug. You cannot expect continued benefit for a chronic disease when you stop taking a drug. The appropriate exercise treatment for frailty is life-long, thus, the need for a centre specialising in the long-term management of this and similar syndromes in older adults.
