By Mary Otto
Leaders at a growing number of U.S. medical centers and military hospitals have begun using an integrative health approach to provide care to patients. They point to growing evidence that combining complementary therapies such as yoga, meditation, acupuncture, nutritional counseling and health coaching with more conventional medical services can help improve health outcomes, according to panelists who spoke about newest efforts at integrative health at a Health Journalism 2018 session.
To learn more about the science behind the integrative approach, the website of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the National Institutes of Health, boasts an array of resources including “research-based info from acupuncture to zinc.”
A data sheet provided by Health Journalism 2018 panelist and physician Wayne B. Jonas, executive director of Integrative Health Programs at the California-based Samueli Institute, includes citations for published research on some of the popular complementary therapies he discussed in his talk.
A 2016 study from the National Center for Health Statistics offers a look at how much Americans are spending on visits to complementary healers and alternative treatments.
Resources are available from the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health, which works to promote integrative medicine in academic, research and clinical settings.
Also, the National Center for Integrative Primary Health Care (NCIPHC) aims to incorporate evidence-based integrative health care practices into medical education. The center also provides a national directory of integrative health school clinics that offer care to low-income and medically-underserved patients.
For more about the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs patient-centered Whole Health program, the agency’s website offers a wide array of resources including a map of VA facilities where the approach is used.
Physician and author Esther Sternberg, who directs the University of Arizona’s Institute on Place and Wellbeing, explained the evolution of her thinking on the science of “healing places” in an extended interview with Krista Tippett, host of the public radio show “On Being.”
