By Dr. C. Evers Whyte
What is “Integrated Medicine?” Ask ten different doctors this question and you might get 10 different answers. It’s an exciting topic in that new findings are being published every day about how the success of medical outcomes are improving through integrating different therapies, protocols and even medical paradigms.
My answer is this: Integrated Medicine is a model through which a physician or therapist first looks at a person who is coming for help, asks themselves, “What does this person need to become whole again?” and then uses any and every tool and resource available to facilitate that healing process. It is more than the combined use of various “conventional” and “alternative” therapies, but aims to access deeper levels of our consciousness. For example, a hug could be clinically described as, “two persons wrapping their arms around each other and squeezing,” but we all know this explanation lacks the true essence of what a hug is all about!
To begin to understand and appreciate the “process” of Integrated Medicine we first have to appreciate that while our bodies are made of interconnected physical systems–cardiovascular, skeletal, endocrine, nervous, etc, we are more than the sum of these parts. We are in actual fact, beings composed of integrated and interpenetrating Intelligences: body, mind, soul, and spirit.
To be healthy, we need all these aspects of our beings to be “aligned” and working harmoniously. If there is dis-harmony, there is dis-ease. As an Integrated Medical physician, I seek to align and integrate all effective medicinal modalities to heal all the integrated elements, or Intelligences, of your being.
The patient that comes into our office with fatigue and brain-fog may be suffering from iron-deficiency, anemia, or adrenal exhaustion, perhaps hypoglycemia, decreased melatonin production, or the reluctance to go through the natural process of grief at a loved-one’s death after a long illness. As I work with the patient to find the root of her ailments, we may discover that a number of these diagnoses are correct, perhaps even all of them. This patient doesn’t have a Prozac deficiency. She may need a change in
her diet (for the hypoglycemia), iron and B-Complex supplementation (for the anemia), hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal rebalancing (for the stress hormones), therapeutic bodywork or acupuncture (to work the negative emotions and chi out of her body and re-balance her autonomic nervous system), and perhaps some grief counseling and a homeopathic remedy to help her face and work through her loss.
Each of the afore mentioned therapies supports the others, treating her whole being to rebuild her natural balanced state of wellbeing. She will recover faster and better being surrounded by physicians and therapists who are working as a team to help her heal. We created The Center For Health Renewal to provide a single location consisting of such a team, to conveniently and most efficiently provide all these types of care and support.
We will regularly be publishing articles on our website that go into more specific detail about the different practices that contribute to Integrated Medicine such as acupuncture, massage therapy, herbology, homeopathic remedies, chiropractic, nutritional support and more, explaining how they work and what their benefits are.
I’d like to begin this effort by explaining “Mind-Body Medicine” and share a true story.
There are many experiences in this world that are hard to fully appreciate until you’ve actually had them. For better or for worse, breaking bones is one of them! My own first experience with what we call “Mind-Body Medicine” came when I was 17, and I shattered a knuckle on my right ring finger playing football. Dr. Rodda, my orthopedist, put two pins into the knuckle to hold the bones together while they healed. He planned to take them out again in three and a half weeks, and casted my arm and hand. His parting words to me were, “Take it easy. If this doesn’t heal well, you may not be able to bend your finger very much.”
“No Way!” I thought, “I’ve got to be ready to play lacrosse this spring.”
Three or four times each day I put my left hand over my right and visualized blue healing light streaming into my broken knuckle, and pictured the bones knitting back together. Three and a half weeks later when Dr. Rodda went to take the pins out of my finger, he found the bone had grown right over them! He couldn’t even see their heads. He said to me, “I don’t understand it–I’ve never seen anyone heal this quickly before!” What he planned to be a quick procedure with only a local anesthetic, had to be rescheduled as a full surgery to grind down the bone just to get the pins out. The doctor wasn’t sure how much mobility I would have in the finger, but predicted I’d never be able to fully bend it again. Well, I bent and stretched and worked the muscle tendons along my finger all winter (ouch!), and had a great lacrosse season. And by the way, my finger still works almost perfectly.
So what happens when the mind directs healing energy (Prana, chi, etheric force, life-energy) to an injury? In my case, bones healed faster.
Thanks for reading! Please explore our website to learn about all our different offerings to improve your health and wellbeing.
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