-By Dr. B G Roopa Lakhsmi (h.c), Founder & MD, WELLBEEING, Integrated Health Centre
The excerpt
from the experts’ world-wide practicing Integrative Medicine...
Integrative
medicine has much larger goals, and is very relevant to the health care crisis
that we face today. Dr. Andrew Weil’s Vision for
the Future of Integrative Medicine
It is about
taking the patient from a state of disease to a state of health. It is about
integrating effective therapeutic methods into a comprehensive strategy that
works for the patient, and that emphasizes personal responsibility on the part
of the patient as well. Dushyant Viswanathan, MD
We can’t
solve non communicable disease with the tools we have in regular medicine.
Integrative medicine is the solution, but providers should be adaptable to the
new models because the old models of getting it into a hospital are not proving
successful.” Dr James Maskell, author of a book
called’ The Evolution of Medicine’, lays out a
step-wise method for physicians to, as the subtitle puts it, “Join the Movement
to Solve Chronic Disease and Fall Back in Love with Medicine.”
Management
of chronic diseases requires a different approach with more emphasis on personalized prevention, health promotion and lifestyle
interventions," It reaffirms the importance of the therapeutic
relationship between practitioner and patient and that focuses on the whole
person (body, mind and spirit) including all aspects of lifestyle,” says Dr Dawie van Velden, a registered family physician, lecturer and
researcher at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Stellenbosch.
In the past
few decades we have seen a sea change in the medical landscape from the solo
practice, primary care country doctor to large urbanized health care systems,
from high-touch, low-cost care to high-tech, specialized, expensive, sometimes
impersonal health care. Some patients feel lost in our current health care
system. They see specialist after specialist and receive prescription after
prescription and test after test. They wonder whether their specialists speak
to each other. It is hoped that the perspectives offered by integrative
medicine will eventually transform mainstream medicine by improving patient
outcomes, reducing costs, improving safety, and increasing patient
satisfaction. says Victor S. Sierpina, MD, ABFM,
ABIHMa James E. Dalen, MD, MPHb a University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston
b Weil Foundation University of Arizona Tucson
When it
comes to improving health care, one fact seems fairly undisputed: “What we have
now is a ‘sick care’ system that is reactive to problems,” says Dr. Ralph Snyderman, MD, Chancellor Emeritus at the Duke
University School of Medicine.
According
to Dr. Ka-Kit Hui, MD, founder and director of the UCLA Center for East-West
Medicine and the Wallis Annenberg Professor in Integrative East-West Medicine,
“current health care works by waiting until symptoms of disease arise, as
opposed to spending more time and effort on disease prevention so that those
problems do not occur in the first place.” He describes a health-disease
continuum, with “feeling great”, “wellness/absence of disease”, and “minor
symptoms” on one hand, and “multiple/chronic symptoms”, “acute/advanced
disease” and “terminal stage/death” on the other.” One of the fundamental flaws
of the typical medical approach is looking at the body in terms of individual
body systems. Patients are often referred by their “jack-of-all-trades” GP, to
“specialist” teams for specific ailments. However, what this approach really
lacks, is the understanding that there are interrelated drivers of health and
disease, that cross multiple organ systems. Disease rarely occurs in isolation,
but rather, sets off a cascade of events within the body that depending on a
person’s individual genetic and lifestyle factors can alter the trajectory of
their health. www.fxmedicine.com.au
The number of US hospitals offering integrative therapies, such as acupuncture, massage therapy, therapeutic touch, and guided imagery, has increased from 8% in 1998 to 42% in 2010.(4) Many academic cancer centers offer these integrative practices as part of a full spectrum of care. Other hospitals offer programs in integrative women’s health, cardiology, and pain management. 2017 The American Journal of Medicine
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