Integrative Health vs. Conventional Medicine

Our society is currently experiencing a sharp increase in complex, chronic diseases. Although our current medical paradigm is the gold-standard in acute disease care, it unfortunately lacks the methodology needed to prevent and treat chronic, otherwise known as lifestyle, diseases. Luckily, this is where integrative health can benefit us the most...

“Almost 20% of the average citizen’s life is spent chronically ill”

Conventional medicine, more scientifically known as biomedicine, is defined as the treatment of disease by remedies that produce effects opposite to the symptoms. I’ll give you an example...rather than question whether fever, a natural immune system response, is a part of the body’s healing process, biomedicine would effectively use acetaminophen to suppress said fever. Integrative health, on the other hand, recognizes that biological processes or symptoms such as fever are, in fact, a part of the healing process and actually signal something deeper. This growing view of health, which takes a patient-centered approach as opposed to the current disease-centered one, finds its roots in five key foundations:

1. Whole-Person Care: The patient is viewed as an interwoven combination of multiple dimensions of health. Integrative Health recognizes, with equal importance, that true health encompasses the physical body, the mind, the spiritual elements that make up one’s belief system, and the environment – including socioeconomic status, quality of relationships, location of residency, etc.

2. Personalized Care: This innovative view of health holds true to the belief that treatment should be specifically tailored to address the patient’s unique constitution, needs, and desires. While the Constitution states that we are all created equal as it relates to our rights, this inherently does not ring true in terms of biology. No two people have the exact same set of genes - epigenetic patterns and all - so why should we all receive the exact same treatment?

3. Patient-Centered Care: Rather than treat the doctor-patient relationship as one similar to the interactions seen between teacher and student - where one is regarded with higher authority - integrative health ensures that the patient is directly involved in the decision-making process. The physician or nutritionist does not have sole power in deciding the patient’s care and treatment – instead, it is a collaboration.

4. Evidence­-Based Care: This fourth pillar is all about integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external evidence from systematic research. By clinical expertise, this means the judgement that practitioners acquire through clinical experience. Integrative health recognizes that the scientific method you learned during science fair is not the only way we learn things; we also learn through experience. We merge this experiential knowledge with the best available evidence, meaning clinically-relevant, up-to-date research that may even invalidate previously-accepted findings.

5. Wellness: What it means to “be healthy” in the eyes of integrative health does not mean one is merely free of disease, as it is in conventional medicine. Integrative health goes beyond disease management – it strives to promote optimum wellbeing by recognizing that lifestyle and environmental factors, those often viewed as outside the realm of traditional healthcare, impact health.

As I’m sure you're already beginning to see, our current healthcare paradigm, which can best be described as conventional medicine, does not operate from these same principles. Conventional medicine can be said to have started in the 17th century with the birth of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes, the father of this philosophical belief system as it applies to medicine, viewed the world through a reductionist lens, meaning it works like a machine, and as a result, the best way to make understanding of it, is to reduce it down to its most basic parts (Beresford, 2010). Applying this perspective to medicine and healthcare, he believed it should be rooted in two things: dualism and mechanicism. What does this mean exactly? According to Descartes, and thus our current healthcare system, the mind is always separate from the body (dualism) and the body is to be treated as a machine in which it can be best understood by viewing it in pieces and studying the individual parts (mechanicism) (Martins, 2018). This is called medical reductionism – a 17th century belief system that we are still unconsciously operating from today. While I personally do recognize the importance of this reductionist approach to many facets of scientific study, it is my, as well as the integrative health paradigm’s, belief that this is not necessarily the best way of approaching human health.

In oversimplifying the human body in this way, viewing each organ as separate and having zero effect on each other, do we eliminate important aspects in the description of it? By specializing medicine down to its most basic parts, don’t we fail to recognize the interactions among bodily systems, and the mind and body as a whole? Reductionist science, despite its’ views, has already proven that the mind does have an effect on the body – the perception of stress and anxiety impacts the stomach in a way that increases heartburn and intestinal permeability, for example (Song et al., 2013). So why are we still operating from such a mechanical view of the human body? We are not a machine – our organ systems work together to keep our biology running every day, so why do we treat them as though they don’t? I’ll leave you with a question…might this correlate to the prevalence of chronic disease we are currently witnessing play out in our society to epic proportions?

“The U.S spent $2.1 trillion on medical care in 2007 which was spent on diseases in progress, and only 5% on precautions and active prevention. Seventy five percent or more of this in-progress disease spending went to treating chronic diseases that are in principle preventable or even reversible” (Ornish et al., 2008)

Here’s how I would answer that question, keeping the concepts of integrative health in mind…While conventional, Western medicine is the gold standard reigning supreme in cases of acute care – think car accident, broken leg, or you just accidentally cut your finger off slicing an onion – but it’s principles aren’t best applied in chronic care – the treatment of diseases that generally cannot be prevented by vaccines or cured by medications, nor do they just appear or disappear; they develop overtime. These diseases, which are currently the leading causes of death not only in America but worldwide (cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and type 2 diabetes) often progress as a result of multiple factors: genetic predisposition, nutrition, physical activity, smoking, etc. Remember how, when stating the foundations of integrative health, I mentioned that lifestyle factors are not considered in the scope of conventional, traditional medicine? Nutrition, physical activity, and whether you smoke or not – are all just a few of the numerous lifestyle and environmental factors that have a great impact on an individual’s risk of developing a chronic disease. And, if you learned something from my previous posts covering the topics of nutrigenomics and epigenetics, these very lifestyle practices ultimately alter more conventionally recognized health factors, like genetics, for the better or worse. Taking this all into account, integrative health provides an innovative opportunity for quality healthcare, offered at more affordable prices, to all of those individuals willing to take personal responsibility for their health as a means to prevent chronic disease.

So, what do you think? Let me know in the comments below or at @thedecodeproject on Instagram because I'd love to hear your thoughts. I am clearly excited and passionate about the potential of integrative health in addressing our current chronic disease epidemic, which is why I'm pursuing a degree and career in this field. Check back next week to see how my experience as a patient in the integrative health world impacted me personally, as well as how my diet was tailored to target my specific, unique health status!

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Resources:

1. Beresford, M. J. (2010). Medical reductionism: Lessons from the great philosophers. QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, 103(9), 721–724. https://doi.org/10.1093/qjmed/hcq057

2. Martins, P. (2018). Descartes and the paradigm of Western medicine: An essay. International Journal of Recent Advances in Science and Technology, 5. https://doi.org/10.30750/ijarst.535

3. MedicineNet. Definition of Chronic Disease. (2016). Available from: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=33490

4. Ornish D, Lin J, Daubenmier J, Weidner G, Epel E, Kemp C, et al. Increased telomerase activity and comprehensive lifestyle changes: a pilot study. Lancet Oncol. 2008;9(11):1048–57.

5. Song, E. M., Jung, H.-K., & Jung, J. M. (2013). The Association Between Reflux Esophagitis and Psychosocial Stress. Digestive Diseases and Sciences, 58(2), 471–477. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10620-012-2377-z