Integrative Approaches Can Transform Healthcare

NEW YORK, Nov. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Integrative healthcare, with its focus on patient engagement, holds a key to resolving many of the issues facing the nation's healthcare system, according to leading medical experts from the military, academia and advocacy who participated in The Bravewell Collaborative's educational forum on transforming healthcare.

"The change we need in the healthcare system to foster health and wellbeing will be driven by leaders who embrace an integrative approach," said Christy Mack, Bravewell president and co-founder.

One of those leaders is Dr. Tracy Gaudet, director of Veteran's Health Administration's newly created Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation. She explained the VHA is attempting one of the most massive changes in the philosophy and process for healthcare delivery ever undertaken by an organized healthcare system.

"We are shifting everything we reward and incentivize," said Gaudet. "As the VA demonstrates new integrative models of care and analyzes the results, these can serve as blueprints for the rest of the healthcare industry."

Dr. Ralph Snyderman, chancellor emeritus of Duke University School of Medicine, explained that science, which has driven our understanding of disease, has given us a false sense of comfort that for every complex disease there is a single underlying factor that causes it.  And many believe the role of the physician is to find it and fix it.

"But health is more than the absence of disease," said Snyderman. "It's a robustness, a positive feeling of worth that is fundamental to everything we do."

Integrative healthcare approaches, especially in the areas of diabetes, depression, cancer and chronic pain are working. A recent BraveNet study found a reduction in pain severity of more than 20 percent and a drop in pain interference of nearly 30 percent in patients after 24 weeks of integrative care such as acupuncture, mindful meditation, and yoga.

The integrative approach addresses the full range of physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual and environmental influences that affect a person's health and then uses the most appropriate interventions from an array of scientific disciplines to help people get and stay well.

Health and Wellbeing: Integrative Medicine and the Transformation of Healthcare was held in New York on November 7, 2013. This is the fourth educational event that The Bravewell Collaborative has convened.

For more information, visit www.bravewell.org.

SOURCE The Bravewell Collaborative