Elizabeth Frates, MD

Dr. Beth Frates is trained as a physiatrist and a health and wellness coach. Her expertise is in lifestyle medicine, and she works to empower patients to reach their optimal level of wellness by adopting healthy habits. A member of the Board of Directors of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, Dr. Frates is helping to shape the scope of this new specialty. She is an award-winning teacher at Harvard Medical School, where she is an assistant clinical professor, and she developed and taught a college lifestyle medicine curriculum at the Harvard Extension School, which is one of the most popular courses offered at the school. She shared a lifestyle medicine syllabus, which can be downloaded through the ACLM website, in hopes that her work can serve as a template for other instructors and professors hoping to teach a course in lifestyle medicine. As the Director of Wellness Programming at the Stroke Institute for Research and Recovery at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Dr. Frates has created and implemented a 12-month wellness program for stroke survivors and their caregivers. She is co-author of the book Life After Stroke: The Guide to Recovering Your Health and Preventing Another Stroke and co-author of three chapters on behavior change in different medical textbooks. And, most recently, she co-authored The Lifestyle Medicine Handbook: An Introduction to the Power of Healthy Habits which was ranked in the top 20 by Book Authority for medical books released in 2018.