Integrative Medicine Popular
Physicians Are Increasingly Using Alternative Methods of Healing
Oct 1, 2008
The philosophy behind this new medicine approach is that people heal best when doctors address the ways biology, psychology, spirituality and lifestyle work together to affect their disease. Practitioners of integrative medicine work to combine the best proven conventional treatment with well-researched alternative treatments such as meditation, yoga, acupuncture, healing touch and herbal therapy.
How the Patients Heal Themselves
The idea is that by improving the quality of life, the patient takes heart and the body begins to heal itself. Patients who have been in severe chronic pain for years are finding themselves first lessening their pain medication doses and then discontinuing them entirely. The results are not only less stress, depression, fatigue and pain for those battling major killers like cancer and heart disease, but significant remission rates.
A Typical Integrative Medicine Hospital
A new patient entering Texas's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Place of Wellness would be quite surprised by his non-hospital-like surroundings. He might see a mauve and beige meditation room with mats on the floor for yoga classes, and a full kitchen set up for instruction in preparing macrobiotic or vegetarian or other healthy ways of eating meals.
He might find patients working out in the gym who previously could barely move due to cancer's invasion. Now they want to work off the weight they gained when they could barely move. In a room down the hall an acupuncturist is busy treating someone who is now off of pain medications and believes he owes it to acupuncture. A classroom is set up with samples of fresh herbs to teach herbal therapy.
None of this is considered weird by anyone here nor do their families and friends who have seen the progress find it odd. The physicians themselves are a humble breed. They have come to accept that Western medicine doesn't have all the answers, and there is no reason to expect that it would or should. They know that patients need to take an active role in their own healing and let the body's wisdom show them the way to oneness.
Who Is Behind This Movement
This movement is being activated by the National Institutes of Health National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This agency has funded more than 1,800 research studies at 260 institutions. And last October the journal "Academic Medicine" published the first list of guiding principles to help doctors and medical students navigate the new world of integrated care.
The newly formed Society for Integrative Oncology, an organization of cancer-related health professionals, recently released new scientific guidelines for research in the cancer field.
Andrew Weil, M.D., one of the nation's leading proponents of integrated care and the founder of one of the country's first integrative-medicine training programs, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, calls it, "The revolution in medicine called for years ago."
