We are complex individuals with physical bodies, feelings and emotions. You might feel tired on Fridays or low on Sunday evenings, struggle with a relationship or two. Back issues, stomach ailments, weight management problems or over-indulgence with comfort food and alcohol are common problems. When you go to your GP and ask for advice, you might be lucky to go home with an anti-inflammatory drug and an antacid.
That’s the real world. Your Family Doctor doesn’t have the time to listen to your life struggles, with an average appointment in the UK lasting for less than 10 minutes. If he or she doesn’t seem to be too interested in all the details around your heartburn, or back problems, it is because they have limited time to tap into a computer, write a brief description of the symptoms and the two medications will provide a quick fix.
Conventional Western medicine is great at saving people’s lives. They use highly potent pharmaceuticals and surgery, two very powerful, high impact interventions for acute disease. If you are in danger of dying, the Doctor might have the tools needed to keep you alive. If you don’t have the strength, focus or ability to get to the route of your problems, and make the required lifestyle changes, your GP or better, a less time-sensitive and more specialised private consultant, can help you cope with your ailments for a long time too.
This comes at a price though. The average drug label lists a whopping 70 side effects, the most common set involving the gastrointestinal system, happy digestion!
Another great benefit of Western medicine, is the ability to test your body and spot when something is really wrong with high tech machinery. When something is really wrong, they’ll be able to detect it. Yet, one in four patients who are diagnosed with cancer in casualty wards will be dead within two months because of late diagnosis. And when something seems just a little bit wrong, the symptoms are not very pronounced, the system is very much geared towards providing you with a pharmaceutical patch of some sort. Because drugs and surgery are the tools Western medicine heavily relies on.
The result? Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half take two, as stated by Mayo Clinic and Olmsted Medical Center research. Antibiotics, antidepressants and painkilling opioids being the most commonly prescribed medicines.
In an ideal scenario, you would want to meet a professional with the time to listen to you, understand your history of health, look at your nutrition, make sense of your lifestyle. In an Integrative Medicine model, healing options would include surgery and prescription drugs for acute, more extreme cases, but would also focus on your physical and psychological environment, the management of key relationships, personal and professional development and mind-body-spirit connection. They would comprise advice for nutritional and lifestyle interventions, the right movement for your body, a relaxation strategy and the right type of emotional support.
Conventional and complementary approaches would lead to a solution geared towards short and long term wellbeing, to feel better now and reach peak health and longevity in the longer term, with a strategy for preventing sickness and not just treating it. A short term fix, is never as good as dealing with the original problem, never as good as eliminating the cause of imbalance.
How can you get this level of attention though? The National Health Service is very much concerned with providing universal care to millions of people and almost exclusively focused on conventional medicine tools. Furthermore, by far the largest amount of medical budget and expertise is deployed on the very lucrative (for Big Pharma) management of long-term chronic conditions and end-of-life care. As the debate on resource allocation and healthcare modalities continues, the pharmaceutical industry overwhelmingly leads the ranking in lobbying money spent to influence Washington politicians.
I really believe Integrative Medicine is the future of healthcare. If you can’t afford to be exposed to a team of practitioners with complementary expertise (the ideal scenario), consider seeking the advice of an Integrative Medicine Doctor, or at least a Therapist that embraces the value of personalised, holistic and preventative healthcare.
Keep a relationship with your conventional Medical Doctor and always seek his/her advice too, particularly when dealing with chronic and acute conditions. But open your mind to a new paradigm, a very different philosophy of health.
Here are the Six Principles of Naturopathy, to which I fully subscribe to:
- The Healing Power of Nature – your body has a tremendous capacity to heal itself when you provide the right environment and conditions for that to happen.
- First, Do No Harm – methods and natural substances which minimize the risk of harmful side effects should be used as much as possible.
- Identify and Address the Cause – environmental and lifestyle triggers and mediators should be considered a key component of the problem. Look beyond the symptoms to the underlying imbalance.
- Practitioner as Teacher – learn and be empowered to listen to, and to look after your body, to make sense of your feelings and take charge of your own wellbeing.
- Focus on the Whole Person – look at yourself from an higher, general perspective first. The physical, genetic, mental, emotional, spiritual, social and environmental spheres make what we are and affect our health.
- Focus on Prevention – better not to get sick in the first place, right?
And these are some of the key Principles of Integrative Medicine, that expand upon the Principles of Naturopathy:
- Appropriate use of both conventional and alternative methods facilitates the body’s innate healing response.
- Integrative medicine neither rejects conventional medicine nor accepts alternative therapies uncritically.
- Good medicine is based in good science first. It is inquiry-driven and open to new paradigms.
Ultimately the best medicine is no medicine – live well and you won’t need much treatment. Focus more of your time on learning how to understand and take care of yourself and develop a passion for personal development. Open your mind to a combination of modern science and ancient practices, traditional and new age healing therapies and embrace a healthy living lifestyle.
And definitely be merry, because…
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”!
