ASLM Member Spotlights showcase the invaluable work that ASLM Fellows, ASLM Accredited Doctors and Practitioners, and member ambassadors are doing to establish Lifestyle Medicine as central to health, healthcare and health policy. ASLM members represent a broad range of medical and health practitioners as well as passionate professionals working in health and wellbeing who believe that and interdisciplinary and lifestyle-centric approach should be considered when it comes to the prevention and management of chronic and lifestyle-related disease.
Meet Accredited Lifestyle Medicine Doctor – Dr Kate Brunsdon
Dr Kate Brunsdon is a medical doctor and Accredited Lifestyle Medicine Physician with a particular interest in preventive health, perimenopause and menopause and helping people understand and modify their future health risks.
She is the founder of a private preventive health and Lifestyle Medicine practice (Future Health Collective, drkate.com.au), where she combines detailed health and lifestyle assessment with body composition, bone health, physical function and fitness testing, conventional medical investigations and, where appropriate, more advanced preventive screening. Her focus is on translating an increasingly complex amount of health information into practical, evidence-based strategies that people can actually use.
In September, Kate will commence a Master of Lifestyle Medicine as part of her pathway towards ASLM Fellowship, with a particular interest in further developing her skills in evidence translation, education and the dissemination of Lifestyle Medicine knowledge.
What is your background?
I trained in Medicine and have trained across several areas; including General Practice, Psychiatry, Women’s Health and Lifestyle Medicine. Over time, my clinical interests have increasingly moved towards prevention—particularly what we can do well before someone develops significant chronic disease or loses physical function. I now run a private preventive health and Lifestyle Medicine practice. My work brings together traditional medical risk assessment with lifestyle, body composition, bone health, strength, power, balance, mobility and cardiovascular fitness. I also help patients navigate appropriate screening and investigations based on their individual risk profile. A major part of what I enjoy is taking a large amount of information and turning it into something meaningful: Where am I now? What are my biggest future risks? What can I change? And what should I prioritise first?
How did you come to Lifestyle Medicine?
Lifestyle Medicine felt like a natural progression from the way I was already practising medicine. The more I worked with patients, the more interested I became in the years and decades before disease is diagnosed. Many of the outcomes we care about later in life—cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, loss of muscle and bone, declining physical capacity and cognitive health—develop over a very long period. I became increasingly interested in how we could use that window more effectively. Lifestyle Medicine provided an evidence-based framework for addressing many of the modifiable factors that influence those trajectories, while still sitting firmly alongside appropriate medical assessment, treatment and screening.
Why did you choose to join ASLM?
I wanted to be part of a professional community that takes Lifestyle Medicine seriously as a clinical discipline and is interested in how we translate the evidence into real-world healthcare. I have completed my Lifestyle Medicine Accreditation and will commence the Master of Lifestyle Medicine in September as I work towards Fellowship. I am particularly looking forward to deepening my knowledge while learning more about education, communication and effective dissemination of health information. There is an enormous amount of health information available to both clinicians and the public now. The challenge is increasingly not simply accessing information—it is working out what is credible, what is clinically meaningful and how to communicate it in a way that leads to useful action.
How has, or how do you envisage this influencing your career/direction?
Preventive health and Lifestyle Medicine are becoming the central focus of my career. Through my private practice, I am developing a more comprehensive model of preventive healthcare that looks beyond individual disease screening to consider a person’s broader health trajectory: cardiometabolic risk, body composition, bone health, physical capacity, sleep, lifestyle, mental wellbeing and other factors that influence long-term health and independence.
I am also becoming increasingly interested in knowledge translation. There is a substantial gap between what is being published in research, what reaches clinical practice and what the public encounters through social media and other sources. Over the next phase of my career, I would like to contribute to closing that gap. I am about to start developing podcasts and webinars alongside my clinical work, with the aim of making evidence-based preventive health and Lifestyle Medicine more understandable and practically useful. Ultimately, I would like my work to sit at the intersection of clinical medicine, prevention, Lifestyle Medicine and health education.
What advice would you give to other health professionals who are considering completing ASLM Accreditation?
If Lifestyle Medicine already influences the way you think about your patients, formal training is a great opportunity to deepen that knowledge and connect it with a broader community of clinicians working in the same space. One of the things I value about Lifestyle Medicine is that it encourages us to look beyond treating an isolated diagnosis. It asks us to consider the person’s longer-term trajectory and the behaviours, environments and clinical factors that may influence it. For me, Accreditation is not an endpoint. It is an opportunity to keep learning, become better at translating evidence into clinical practice and contribute to the wider conversation about how prevention can become a more meaningful part of healthcare.
Please tell us a random fact about yourself
I love reading romantic fantasy books, and I tend to get through a new book every few days. It’s my guilty pleasure and escape!
