Integrated Medicine

July 20, 2017

You are taking an important step toward improving your health and protecting the health of your family. The truth is that diseases don't just happen. They result from complex, interacting factors. These are often predictable. They are also distinct for each individual person. Doctors don't cure diseases. At best we use our technical skills, our knowledge of science and our passion for helping others to enable people to heal themselves. At worst, we undermine the healing process by ignoring the needs of the person who is sick or the body's requirements for healing itself. The best treatments--medical and surgical--depend for their ultimate effects on the healing power of the body. These insights have begun to change the way we think about health and illness. We have learned that suppressing disease is not enough to restore health. People everywhere, doctors included, are hungry for information that allows them to strengthen the healing process. During thirty years as a practicing physician, I have attempted to understand why some people who are ill regain their health entirely, while other people with the same disease receiving the same treatment fail to recover and still others get better only to become sick over and over again. My research led me to the conclusion that long-term health outcomes are primarily controlled by important factors in the lives of each person. I call these factors the "pillars of healing." Supporting them often has a more profound effect upon health than merely treating disease. Since publishing the first edition of my book, POWER HEALING (Random House, 2nd edition 1998) I have encountered a growing acceptance of the importance of these pillars for restoring and maintaining health. Medical centers across the nation are feeling pressure from the communities they serve to be more patient-centered. Many are attempting to incorporate therapies which help to heal the person, not just treat the disease. Health maintenance organizations are exploring the concept of "integrated management" for patients with chronic disorders like diabetes, asthma and arthritis. The most enlightened are beginning to realize that merely treating people with suppressive drugs is not cost-effective; they need to help people change their diets, their environments, their exercise patterns, and their attitudes. Experts on the problems of ageing have concluded that the health of elderly Americans will benefit more from measures that improve physical strength, immune function, mood and social interaction than by the medical treatment of those diseases which ravage the elderly. Alarmed at the rising global childhood mortality rate, the World Health Organization has concluded that treating each life-threatening disease as a separate entity does not work. Nutritional therapies to improve immunity and environmental hygiene to limit exposure to infections and to toxins can accomplish more. We are on the brink of a revolution in health care which is being driven not by technology but by the recognition that healing people is more effective than treating diseases. The table below illustrates the evolution of these discoveries.