Email   Print

Share

Five steps to better health through integrative medicine

How integrative medicine can make health care simpler, more effective and more affordable.

Marco Visscher, Ursula Sautter and Carmel Wroth | November 2009 issue

Suffering from headaches and depression? Don't let your doctor put you on Prozac; instead, look for the underlying causes.

Maybe there are problems at work or at home that you can solve.

High cholesterol? Try the Mediterranean diet, with a glass of red wine a day. And if you really need to take statins, drink green tea to counteract the harmful side effects.

The best way to win the “war on cancer”? Eat healthy, exercise and develop an active social life.

An increasing number of physicians are realizing that this type of approach—geared to prevention and a conservative use of medications and technology—not only increases patients’ vitality but saves lots of money. In the debate over health care reform, one group of doctors and researchers would like to change more than just how health care costs are covered. They believe—in the words of Dean Ornish, founder and chairman of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California—that it is time to “change not only who is covered but also what is covered.” With that insight as a starting point, they hope to inspire President Obama to take a different approach to health care.

Ornish and other critics of the current system claim that a great deal of Western medicine is too often ineffective and sometimes even harmful. There is an overemphasis, they say, on treating symptoms and on the idea that caring for your health is primarily the responsibility of medical experts rather than of individuals themselves. Zhaoming Chen, chairman of the American Association of Integrative Medicine (AAIM), describes the way things currently work as sick: “We only treat the disease after it occurs.” The figures bear him out: 95 cents out of every dollar spent on health care is spent on treating illness. “The best way to reduce the costs is prevention,” he says.

The emphasis on prevention is a crucial element in “integrative medicine,” a practice that combines the best of Western health care with alternative or complementary healing methods employed when conventional therapies are ineffective. Integrative medicine puts the patient, not the doctor or the insurance company, at the center of attention, and it puts the focus on the sources of illness not the symptoms. As it becomes more likely that health care reform will not result in any drastic changes, integrative health offers simple, effective and cost-effective solutions for much of what ails both patients and the delivery of medical care.

The litany of health care problems is by now pretty familiar. Costs are escalating, along with the instances of conditions like cancer, diabetes and heart disease. The U.S. ranks 37th in the quality of its health care system, according to a 2000 World Health Organization report, despite spending twice as much per person as any other developed country. Some 48 million Americans, 16 percent of the population, don’t have insurance; a lot of those who have it discover, when they become ill, that they don’t have enough. Earlier this year, the American Journal of Medicine published a study showing that illness and medical bills contribute to more than half of all personal bankruptcies—a portion that’s increasing fast. Of the cases studied, three-quarters involved individuals with health insurance, most of whom were well-educated, owned their own homes and had decent jobs.

Daniel Dunphy, a doctor with the San Francisco Preventive Medical Group, an integrative clinic where both conventional and alternative therapies are prescribed, shakes his head at the statistics. He believes that whatever reform is eventually passed, it will not bring about the necessary fundamental changes. “What we now have is not a health care system; it’s a medical delivery system,” Dunphy says, referring to the tendency of doctors to prescribe pills or refer patients to specialists whether they need it or not. “And we’re even bad at that. We give medical care to people who don’t need it. And when people do need medical care, we don’t give it to them. But if we do, we do everything we can to avoid reimbursing them.”

The exclusion of “pre-existing conditions” from coverage has long been a point of contention between insurers and consumers. Less well publicized is the fact that tests, interventions and procedures for which there is no sound medical basis account for around 30 percent of all medical expenditures, according to a statement from last year’s Health Reform Summit convened by the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance.

In a recent article on the New England Journal of Medicine website, Robert A. Levine, clinical professor of laboratory medicine at Yale University, blames unnecessary care on “perverse incentives” that reward doctors for every procedure: a prescription for medicine, a referral for a test, or an operation. “Even if all physicians were highly ethical and ordered only tests and treatments they deemed truly important,” Levine wrote, “it would take saints not to have their judgment skewed in favor of decisions that will provide them with financial rewards.”

Health care costs are continually rising but people are not getting any healthier. Any reform that does not address this fact will fail. So here is Ode’s five-point prescription for the future of health care, a prescription that applies the tenets of integrative medicine to make health care simpler, more effective and more affordable.

1 2 3 4 5 6 NEXT >>
view as a single page

Tools: Discuss | Email | Print | RSS | Weekly Newsletter Save/Share:

Comments

Post a comment