What Is Integrative Medicine? How does it relate to Homeopathic Medicine in Utah? Who has jurisdiction over the field of Integrative Medicine?

A major challenge for medicine in this century is the need to move beyond the Newtonian concept of "diagnosis" of late-stage physical ailment and the application of a label called a "disease". We are faced with an epidemic of chronic illness which we, as allopathic practitioners, with our limited toolkit of pharmaceutical drugs, ionizing radiation, and surgery, are ill-equipped to treat. One has only to look at the increasingly expensive treatments offered through standard allopathic care, largely covered and paid for by "health" insurance, with increasingly disappointing results to the patient who is looking for improvement in health.

If we were equipped to treat obesity, cardiometabolic syndrome, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease and cancer, our population would be healthy. Instead, we see increasing rates of obesity, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, diabetes, autoimmune disease and cancer, despite the very best of medical care that allopathic medicine has to offer.

The State of Affairs in Traditional Medicine

Some of the patients who choose to see an "alternative" or "integrative" or "homeopathic" practitioner do so because their regular insurance-based allopathic practitioner is unable to give them a physical diagnosis, or simply gives them a pill to mask their symptoms rather than actually digging for the cause of the symptoms, or gives them a pill which causes "side effects" for which more pills are given, in a vicious cycle.

Others of these patients come to the "alternative" or "integrative" or "homeopathic" practitioner because they have been told that all their tests are negative, and they were offered a pill - generally an anti-depressant - to help them "feel better." We call such patients the "Expensive Clinic Rejects".

And now that some conventional allopathic medicine organizations like the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) are beginning to use the term "Integrative Medicine" to mean conventional medicine plus some supplements or yoga, the field becomes even more confusing for patients.[1]

Shifting the Paradigm

To be told that the cause of one's symptoms is psychological rather than physical is deeply offensive to some people - particularly to those who have a clear albeit undiagnosed functional disturbance. The fact that an article on this very topic appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2002 - calling for a "paradigm shift" - is instructive.

"We propose a paradigm shift in which unexplained symptoms are remedicalized around the notion of a functional disturbance of the nervous system and treatments currently considered "psychiatric" are integrated into general medical care."[2]

Functional disturbances are all very well and good, but if they cannot be tested because the patient cannot afford the tests (since their "health" insurance often does not cover the testing), of what utility is identifying the potential for such disturbance?

The History of Homeopathic Medicine

Homeopathic medicine came into being in the 19th century with Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, who stopped using the standard allopathic treatments of his day because he felt the effect of the treatments was worse than the effect of the disease. From the perspective of advanced homeopathic medicine, all disease or dysfunction is considered to be an external manifestation of an internal bio-energetic disorder unique to the individual. Homeopathic medicine looks for that substance which will correct the energetic defects or dysfunctions unique to a given individual, and restore that individual to the original template of full health.

As technology has advanced, we have learned how to measure energetic dysfunctions and departures from the original template. We are now able to treat with substances that can restore the harmony of the information systems which subtend the body's cellular function, right down to the level of the DNA. These substances may include things like electromagnetic energy, homeopathic remedies, combination remedies, and even physical remedies such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids.

Functional Medicine teaches us how to modify our diet and lifestyle in order to reconfigure those epigenetic DNA switches.

Addressing Every Aspect of Health

Integrative medicine - true integrative medicine - uses many modalities to diagnose dysfunction and effect treatment. These modalities may range from conventional allopathic, surgical, and pharmaceutical to homeopathic to bioenergetic to bioelectrical to orthomolecular (functional biologic terrain assessment) to manipulative (chiropractic, osteopathic, massage, Tai Qi, massage) to neural injection therapies with homeopathic remedies. All of these modalities may be effective in certain patients. None is necessarily effective in all patients. And until we realize that one size does not fit all and that standards of care are not necessarily applicable to all patients, we will continue to have the struggle between conventional allopathic medicine and those practitioners who espouse other forms of the healing arts.

Not all homeopathic practitioners utilize all the modalities available to them in their care of patients. All the modalities require special training in addition to what was received during medical school, internship, and residency training. Most practitioners have undergone hundreds of hours of additional training in order to be able safely to utilize these additional modalities. For some of the modalities, there is no accepted training program. The modalities may be developed as the treatment progresses, based on patient response and practitioner ability, knowledge, and intuition.

Finding a Unique Solution

There is no "one size fits all" in good medicine. That is both the beauty and the curse of the human condition. But let there be no doubt that to limit "integrative medicine" to the realm of "alternative", something to use incidentally or on the side, is to severely limit both the potential for healing and the potential for the development of new modalities of healing. We recognize that there may be unintended effects along the way - just as there are in the allopathic version of a medicine. But that is part of the human condition, and part of the risk taken when new paths are explored.

In other words, we are responsible for taking what seems to us to be the right course on the river, but we do not necessarily have control over where the river winds while finding its destination.

Medicine is an art, as well as science. And no matter how hard we try to force medicine into the box of the Newtonian paradigm, it keeps escaping from that box.

Epigenetics, genetic mutations, environmental changes and pollutants, food quality, and kind - all these things affect each of us differently and may result in different results of therapy for apparently identical conditions in different patients.

That is the essence of Homeopathic and Integrative Medicine.

• [1] 9th Annual Integrative Oncology Training Conference for Acupuncturists, Massage Therapists, and Yoga Teachers. ASCO 2013
• [2] Sharpe M, Carson A. "Unexplained" somatic symptoms, functional syndromes, and somatization: do we need a paradigm shift? Ann Intern Med. 2001 May 1;134(9 Pt 2):926-30.
• [3] Pardian GN, Sugiyama H. Strategies To Modulate Heritable Epigenetic Defects in Cellular Machinery: Lessons from Nature. Pharmaceuticals 2013, 6(1), 1-24; doi:10.3390/ph6010001
• [4] Ho E, Clarket JD, Dashwood RH. Dietary Sulforaphane, a Histone Deacetylase Inhibitor for Cancer Prevention. J Nutr. 2009 December; 139(12): 2393-2396. doi: 10.3945/jn.109.113332
• [5] CAM = Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• [6] Ely JW, Osheroff JA et al. A taxonomy of generic clinical questions: classification study. BMJ 2000;321:429.1.