Exercise Is Medicine
nonprofit initiative
Exercise is Medicine (EIM) is a nonprofit initiative co-launched on November 5, 2007, by the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Medical Association, with support from the Office of the Surgeon General and the 18th Surgeon General Regina Benjamin.
Overview and history
The Exercise is Medicine (EIM) initiative calls for physical activity to be included as a standard part of medical treatment and the patient care process. EIM urges healthcare providers to assess the physical activity levels of their patients at every visit, provide physically inactive patients with brief counseling, and 'write' a basic exercise prescription. Before leaving the clinic setting, inactive patients should also receive a referral to available physical activity resources in the community to assist with becoming more physically active. EIM should be differentiated from Exercise Medicine, which is a medical specialty that exists in some countries, as part of Sport & Exercise Medicine.
EIM was started by American College of Sports Medicine President Robert E. Sallis, MD, FACSM in 2007, who has continued to serve as the chair of the EIM initiative since its inception. Under the guidance of Dr. Sallis and the EIM advisory board, Adrian Hutber, PhD, served as the first vice president and has overseen the global development of the initiative over its first decade of existence. From 2007 to 2017, EIM grew into a "global health" initiative with a presence in more than 40 countries worldwide. The initial five years of the initiative focused on increasing global awareness that "exercise is good medicine".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Exercise Is Medicine” as nonprofit initiative. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as nonprofit initiative. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5420059. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007 and 2017.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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- Expand the search: follow Exercise Is Medicine primary sources, Exercise Is Medicine archive and Exercise research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Exercise Is Medicine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.