The evidence is in. There’s strong evidence that plant-based diets are good medicine for the prevention and treatment of many diseases. But patients have been complaining for years that doctors don’t know anything about this. Their doctors complain that they didn’t learn it in medical schools or even in continuing education classes. This situation has caused too many patients to be deprived of better health and longer lives, while frustrating their doctors every time a patient asks for help. Nothing changed, until now.

Our Prescribe Vegetarian Campaign is designed to change both the medical schools’ curricula and doctors’ continuing education to include the prevention and treatment of disease with a plant- based diet. If you support this campaign, please consider making a tax-deductible donation by clicking on the button below. Vegetarians of Washington is a 501(c)3 organization, registered in the state of Washington.  Here’s our plans, and what we’ve achieved so far:

Stewart Rose gives a presentation on Preventing and Treating Coronary Artery Disease with a Plant-Based diet to Naturopathic students at Bastyr University

We’ve reached out and met with medical schools to encourage them to include the prevention and treatment of disease with a plant-based diet in medical student training, and we offered to help them do it. Saying that there’s no room in the curriculum won’t work anymore. We made sure they knew that diet is the number one risk factor for disease and disability.

Since the medical schools didn’t have anyone to teach the students this information, we’ve given lectures and we’ve held a Medical Seminar on Saturday evening at Vegfest for the past four years. We are grateful that the University of Washington School of Medicine sends an email to every medical student recommending our Vegfest Medical Seminar. We’ve also given lectures to resident doctors in Tacoma and a class that doctors attended with their patients. We haven’t forgotten naturopathic medicine either. We’ve given lectures to students at Bastyr university, and even held a day-long seminar for them.

Now we’re taking our Campaign a step further. We have written, and had published in peer-reviewed medical journals, over 30 different articles on various aspects of preventing and treating disease with a plant-based diet. These are published on our medical website, Plant-Based Diets in Medicine. We’ve compiled the first 25 of these articles into a unique textbook for physicians “The Prevention and Treatment of Disease with a Plant-Based Diet” which we are now promoting to physicians and medical students across the country.

We’re taking our Vegfest Medical Seminar to the next level too. We’ve teamed up with the Washington State Medical Association to apply for continuing medical education credits (CME’s) which all doctors need to maintain their certification, for doctors who attend our Vegfest Medical Seminar.

We’ve gotten our foot in the door, but to walk through it we need your help. The American Medical Association charges several thousand dollars to certify providers of CME’s, and the medical journals charge over a thousand dollars in author fees to review and publish each article. Here’s how you can help. If you support this campaign, please consider making a tax-deductible donation by clicking on the button below. Vegetarians of Washington is a 501(c)3 organization, registered in the state of Washington.