The Daily Tar Heel
URL: http://www.dailytarheel.com/index.php/article/2010/09/integrative_medicineis_the_future
Current Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:37:43 -0500
Integrative medicine is the future
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Drugs. We all use them — whether recreationally or to treat medical problems. And the thing is, we use them too often.
When you are choosing a treatment for a medical problem, there are better treatment options for you than prescription drugs.
One of the biggest problems with most prescription drugs is that they treat the symptoms of an ailment, without addressing the root cause of the problem.
The root of the problem most likely has to do with some aspect of your body being out of balance.
While you were taught in high school biology class that our bodies are based on chemical balances, one thing you probably weren’t taught is that our bodies also have a balance of different energies.
For example, being stressed can trigger an imbalance of energies, putting a strain on your immune system, causing you to get sick.
An emerging type of medicine called Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM for short) heals by restoring the energy balances within the body. Reiki, (pronounced Ray-key), acupuncture, and other techniques use touch and pressure points to restore this energy balance.
The other day, I was talking with Sarah Gibson, a friend of mine who is a Reiki healer. She explained that Reiki is a Japanese healing technique that uses touch and massage to heal the body and restore natural life energy balances. Her first experience with Reiki came when she injured her foot a few years ago and had been having ongoing pain. She met a Reiki healer who worked on her foot, and afterward, the pain was gone.
After hearing this, I was skeptical and couldn’t help thinking that Reiki sounded more like some sort of hippie trend than a legitimate healing tool.
But I discovered that our own UNC Hospitals regularly use Reiki, acupuncture and several other integrative medicine techniques to treat patients in the Lineberger Cancer Center. Providers there couple Reiki with chemo treatments to counteract its destructive nature.
This coupling of Western medicine and alternative techniques, called integrative medicine, is a model which is becoming increasingly popular. In fact, according to the National Institutes of Health, 38 percent of American adults used complimentary and alternative medicine in 2007.
Often, when we think of “healing” in Western medicine, we think of it in the physical sense of the word. With a broken bone or a torn muscle, we get surgery, do the physical therapy and expect our bodies to go back to the way they were before the injury.
Integrative medicine suggests that the healing process must be more holistic, and must include a healing of the mind and the body’s energy fields.
I encourage you to ask about integrative medicine the next time you go to the doctor. Chances are, your doctor will encourage you to try it, but will warn you that it will be expensive, since it is not covered by most medical insurance plans.
If enough patients ask about integrative medicine and enough doctors support it, eventually insurance companies will have to cover it. So go ahead and ask away, with your help our society can see progress toward more holistic, integrative medical treatments.
Sarah Dugan is an At-Large Columnist for The Daily Tar Heel. She is a senior environmental health science major from Asheville.
sdugan@email.Unc.Edu
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11 comments
You almost lost me at:
“one thing you probably weren’t taught is that our bodies also have a balance of different energies”
but you got me back at:
“After hearing this, I was skeptical and couldn’t help thinking that Reiki sounded more like some sort of hippie trend than a legitimate healing tool.”
And you won me over at:
“But I discovered that our own UNC Hospitals regularly use Reiki, acupuncture and several other integrative medicine techniques to treat patients in the Lineberger Cancer Center.”
Excellent piece!
But didn’t the AP release an article back in 2009 detailing how our government had spent billions in researching alternative medicine like this only to find out that it was no more effective than placebo?
Yes, yes they did.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31190909/
Alternative medicine is the past, not the future. If it worked it would be called medicine, not alternative medicine. The only randomized controlled studies of Reiki have found that it is no more effective than placebo. The anecdote offered by your friend does not constitute evidence. The future is science based medicine, not superstitious hand-waving.
Dear people who know nothing about science,
Please do not write about science. You only embarrass yourself.
All the best,
Your Face
@your face – this comment on the article you reference says it all: “This is the third or fourth article in a week denouncing alternative treatments. Pray tell, MSNBC, which pharmaceutical company is funding this junk journalism?”
Go ahead, load up on drugs instead, Big Pharma needs the money. Oh, and don’t forget to get your flu shot. Bwahahahahahahah!
Oops, sorry that was supposed to be a reply to Dr Scientist.
@DontAnnoyMe – Why does the journalism matter? It is the science that is funded by the Federal Government and your tax dollars (i.e. not the pharmaceutical companies who produce the drugs that save millions of lives each year) that matters, and the government funded studies have revealed that hippie medicine is no more effective than placebo.
Also, I really hope that your severely uneducated post isn’t serious (i.e. trolling), but I figured I would respond anyway.
I would agree with these posts opposing the thinking expressed in this article, if the thinking was making a call for pure alternative medicine. If I had to choose, I would always put my backing behind pure, scientifically-founded medicine over alternative medicine. However, Dugan calls for integrative medicine, where the best aspects of both can be used. Modern medicine may be excellent at curing the actual ailment, but I can say that medicine has also failed in its attempts at pain management and quality of life treatments (We can reduce a person’s pain, but we also end up numbing out their brain and motor functions, too). So, while alternative medicine may not be able to do anything about your broken arm, it may do a better job than normal medicine at dealing with the pain and recovering full mobility of the arm (I personally used alternative techniques to fix the awkward way in which my arm reset after it healed.)
@Mystic – I will certainly concede that the pain management techniques of modern, western medicine do indeed have the undesired consequences that you mention, but I will not concede that alternative medicine can provide a better option.
The science indicates that there is no useful aspect of alternative medicine that can be “integrated.” There is only the placebo effect, which we can recreate with any number of false “treatment” options.
This post is evil.
Normally, I’d do a breakdown of its egregious logical fallacies, but today I’ll instead start by pointing out the audacious presumption that CAM supporters demonstrate when they assume that their metaphysical claims about the mind and body—claims that have repeatedly failed to stand up to serious scrutiny and are often based off premises known to be false—supersede the precious insights gained through literally billions of hours of painstaking research. They believe themselves to be the privileged few who know better than everyone else. What gall!
So here comes Sarah, gleefully peddling “Integrative Medicine” (IM), today’s “cure of what ails ya”. It’s very telling that nowhere does she talk about evidence or even suggest that she has any interest in determining effectiveness. She has no interest in truth. She simply assumes that she has the correct answers. She’s an ideologue trying to pressure industry into funding her belief system.
One tragedy here is she probably doesn’t realize she’s being duped. IM is a perfect storm: just “technical-sounding” enough to keep flags from being raised, all while working in vague, indefinable concepts like “energy imbalances”. It’s poppycock, but why does Sarah believe it? Probably for many reasons, but a big one is that we humans rarely spend a lot of effort trying to come up with ways to prove ourselves wrong. Instead, we’re biased to try to reaffirm our own beliefs. That’s the strength of science: it is actively skeptical of its own presumptions, constantly checking itself with study after study.
The real tragedy here—what makes this post truly wicked—is that Sarah is calling for us to spend our all-too-finite healthcare resources on treatments KNOWN to be ineffective. Sadly, IM is becoming more popular, but not because it works. No, science-based medicine (SBM) is a victim of its own success. It’s so easy to forget that as recently as 1950 of every 1,000 babies born over 29 would die. In 60 years that number has dropped by more than ¾ to 6.3. Thus, in 2009 alone, SBM saved the lives of 95,000 babies. Sarah and her ilk would have us use our precious resources to pay some Reiki “healer” to literally wave their hands in the air and chant and while infants continue to die.
It’s sad when someone comes out of the education system and lacks critical thinking skills. However, it’s negligent to then engage in public discourse and obfuscate the conversation with ignorance and nonsense. Beyond that, it’s heartless, vicious, and evil to condemn babies to death over a belief in magic. She ought to be ashamed of herself.
All you ever hear nowadays is about treatment and drugs to help with the problem. Why in the world don’t we use prevention as a tool. With the right diet, exercise, sleeping habits, and even supplements and vitamins, a lot of things can be avoided. I am not saying people won’t get sick but certainly a lot less. I have been taking Beta 1,3-D glucan by NutriMune and it has been a godsend. I recommend people checking it out.
http://www.immunable.com
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