Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Monday, December 5, 2011
13 steps to health
A whole person approach to wellness care:
1) Breathing
2) Sleep, rest, & relaxation
3) Mindfulness & Meditation
4) Prayer & spiritual connection
5) Proper Diet/Eating Hygiene
6) Exercise & Stretching & Bodywork/Massage
7) Self-understanding & Mental Health care
8) Faith, Hope, & Love
9) Feng Shui
10) Body-mind integration (Yoga, Qi-Gong)
11) Herbs, supplements, medications, and homeopathy
12) Holisitic Interventions (Acupuncture, Chiropractic, Energy Medicine)
13) Western Medical Interventions (Surgery)
1) Breathing
2) Sleep, rest, & relaxation
3) Mindfulness & Meditation
4) Prayer & spiritual connection
5) Proper Diet/Eating Hygiene
6) Exercise & Stretching & Bodywork/Massage
7) Self-understanding & Mental Health care
8) Faith, Hope, & Love
9) Feng Shui
10) Body-mind integration (Yoga, Qi-Gong)
11) Herbs, supplements, medications, and homeopathy
12) Holisitic Interventions (Acupuncture, Chiropractic, Energy Medicine)
13) Western Medical Interventions (Surgery)
Saturday, July 16, 2011
The Functional Spectrum of Wellness and Disease
Dr. Len Saputo, M.D. from his book A Return to Healing, has another great tool to asses health and wellness. The Functional Spectrum of Wellness and Disease
0% - 25% - 50% - 75% - 100%
<.......................................>
When working with clients, the goal is to help clients move closer to 100%. Any increase in health toward 100% is success. Whether it it something small like reducing smoking from 3 packs to 2 packs, or something large like heart surgery, movement towards 100% is what healthcare and wellness care is about. Keep in mind, however, 100% is different for everyone. 100% for one person may appear as 25% for another. Anything below 50% is where symptoms begin to surface and functionality becomes impacted.
So what is the best way to move a patient towards ideal health? Dr. Len Saputo has also developed a hierarchy of treatment modalities.
1) Lifestyle strategies such as diet, sleep, exercise, stress reduction, weight control, reduction of toxic chemicals, balance, etc.
2) Noninvasive complementary and alternative (CAM) services such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, chiropractic, massage and bodywork, homeopathy, counseling, health coaches, and energy medicine.
3) Natural-medicine approaches such as orthomolecular medicine, functional medicine, bioenergetic research, and advanced testing.
4) Very careful and sparing use of pharmaceutical drugs, surgery and other invasive strategies as a last line of defense.
Seems to me to be a reasonable, cost-effective, patient empowering model of healthcare. It starts with prevention and self care, supplemented with trained medical professional help to encourage and promote the natural healing process. When prevention and support does not work, targeted testing and individualized medicine determines what is going wrong and what needs to be done to move the patient towards a more functional wellness. The use of pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, and advanced procedures in this context can then be used to finally tip the scales towards health and wellness when the disease or condition is unmanageable without further intervention.
0% - 25% - 50% - 75% - 100%
<.......................................>
When working with clients, the goal is to help clients move closer to 100%. Any increase in health toward 100% is success. Whether it it something small like reducing smoking from 3 packs to 2 packs, or something large like heart surgery, movement towards 100% is what healthcare and wellness care is about. Keep in mind, however, 100% is different for everyone. 100% for one person may appear as 25% for another. Anything below 50% is where symptoms begin to surface and functionality becomes impacted.
So what is the best way to move a patient towards ideal health? Dr. Len Saputo has also developed a hierarchy of treatment modalities.
1) Lifestyle strategies such as diet, sleep, exercise, stress reduction, weight control, reduction of toxic chemicals, balance, etc.
2) Noninvasive complementary and alternative (CAM) services such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, chiropractic, massage and bodywork, homeopathy, counseling, health coaches, and energy medicine.
3) Natural-medicine approaches such as orthomolecular medicine, functional medicine, bioenergetic research, and advanced testing.
4) Very careful and sparing use of pharmaceutical drugs, surgery and other invasive strategies as a last line of defense.
Seems to me to be a reasonable, cost-effective, patient empowering model of healthcare. It starts with prevention and self care, supplemented with trained medical professional help to encourage and promote the natural healing process. When prevention and support does not work, targeted testing and individualized medicine determines what is going wrong and what needs to be done to move the patient towards a more functional wellness. The use of pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, and advanced procedures in this context can then be used to finally tip the scales towards health and wellness when the disease or condition is unmanageable without further intervention.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Healing Circles- A Novel Treatment and Diagnosis Method
Imagine you as a patient have searched for years, maybe even decades, for the answer to why you always feel unwell. You have gone from doctor to doctor, and have tried everything from medications to energy healing. Some things help temporarily. At best most things don't do anything and often new treatments make it worse. You have a few doctors or practitioners that you like and you go to see them somewhat regularly, but they certainly have no interest in coordinating your care. You simply see one for the pain, another for information, and another for a medication, and so on.
Dr. Len Saputo has developed a novel way of diagnosis called the Healing Circle. It brings together a team of 3-8 physicians and practitioners from different fields to sit down with a patient in a 2 hour session. The patient shares his/her history (medical, social, spiritual, emotional, etc) with the group and the group subsequently works together to find a treatment plan that is honest about what each field of medicine can and cannot do, is complementary to all healing practices involved, and supports the whole person.
The Healing Circle was developed and born out of more than 15 years of collaboration with the Health Medicine Forum and his subsequent integrative health practices in San Franscisco, CA.
Watch this video of a circle:
To learn more about Healing Circles, visit www.doctorsaputo.com or you can read Dr. Saputo's many books, including A Return to Healing: Radical Health Care Reform and the Future of Medicine
Dr. Len Saputo has developed a novel way of diagnosis called the Healing Circle. It brings together a team of 3-8 physicians and practitioners from different fields to sit down with a patient in a 2 hour session. The patient shares his/her history (medical, social, spiritual, emotional, etc) with the group and the group subsequently works together to find a treatment plan that is honest about what each field of medicine can and cannot do, is complementary to all healing practices involved, and supports the whole person.
The Healing Circle was developed and born out of more than 15 years of collaboration with the Health Medicine Forum and his subsequent integrative health practices in San Franscisco, CA.
Watch this video of a circle:
To learn more about Healing Circles, visit www.doctorsaputo.com or you can read Dr. Saputo's many books, including A Return to Healing: Radical Health Care Reform and the Future of Medicine
Friday, May 27, 2011
Major Trends and Health Care Industry Outlook
The philosophy and substantive development of an Integrative Health Care model has been evolving over the past few decades. According to Clement Bezold in his article Evolving Demands and Demographics in Health Care, “90% of the variance in premature death in modern society is related to factors other than the lack of health care. Currently, the vast majority of morbidity and mortality is associated with lifestyle, genetic, and environmental factors.” According to the Center for Disease Control:
• 7 out of 10 deaths among Americans each year are from chronic diseases. Heart disease, cancer and stroke account for more than 50% of all deaths each year.
• In 2005, 133 million Americans – almost 1 out of every 2 adults – had at least one chronic illness.
• About one-fourth of people with chronic conditions have one or more daily activity limitations.
Many of these chronic diseases are preventable through simple diet, exercise, and healthy lifestyle choices. Clearly, there is a need for our health systems to shift from infection and acute and emergency trauma care towards medical and wellness care targeted at our 21st century health problems. While this does not call for an elimination of our evidence-based biomedical health care, it does call for an integration of biomedicine into health systems designed to address lifestyle modification and reduce environmental and genetic risk factors. According to the Institute of Medicine in their February 2009 Summary Report of Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public, “the interactions between an individual’s social, economic, psychological, and physical environments, and his or her biological susceptibility to illness and responsiveness to treatment; the nature of the care process, as well as its content; and the often greater health benefit to be had from certain “lower tech” interventions, rather than more costly approaches” are part of a bigger picture needed to create this new health care system. Unfortunately, these factors are often overlooked in our current health care system, which are necessary when working with chronic and preventable disease. The tools needed to move our health care system towards one that addresses lifestyle, environment, and genetics and takes into account environmental factors, biological susceptibility and responsiveness, the care process, and lower tech inventions are already at our finger tips. We have the technology to detect early risk factors, know the best preventative measures and lifestyle interventions needed, have a rich array of health care practices and theories of medicine, and we understand the motivations and interventions need to modify human behavior on both an individual and community wide scale.
The factors needed to refocus our health systems, however, are at times in direct conflict with major trends in health care. In an effort to address them as quickly as possible, often the most effective answer is considered too difficult to achieve (for reasons such as finances or logistics) or is simply missed because the patient interactions with the environment, biological susceptibility and responsiveness, the care process, and “lower tech” interventions are not utilized in solution assessments. Trends in individualized medicine, for example, tends to focus on complex and expensive treatment plans, when often a patient just wants an extra few minutes with the doctor, or just wants the pain to stop which could potentially be managed more effectively with greater cost savings with a service such as acupuncture. Patient demand for maximum level of care, again, also trends towards complex and expensive treatments. Ultimately, a patient wants to be heard and wants the problem to be fixed, and without addressing the root cause and instead focusing on fixing the problem once it has become broken, medical costs and frustration with ineffective and/or slow treatment results become common when treatment and interventions don’t work immediately. Direct consumer advertising of health care interventions and treatment options is also driving up costs because patients are demanding these products and services advertised and providers are at times under pressure to utilize certain products and services. When both provider and patient are under pressure to utilize the same products and services, the result is treatments that may not be the most effective and may be more costly, especially since direct consumer advertising focuses on new innovations and technology which are inherently more expensive. Since current health care financing control is not driven by price and patients are often unaware of the costs of products and services, the trend in direct consumer advertising has few checks and balances. Comprehensive disease management, however, is fortunately a trend that integrative health excels at addressing and this, perhaps, is one of the biggest factors in the growth of integrative health care.
Integration of Complementary and Alternative Medicine is a critical aspect of creating an integrative health care facility; however, the integration of CAM into contemporary western medical facilities, as if they were a few extra silos in the bunch, is not a viable model. CAM is unique is its delivery of care because care encompasses diet and nutrition, spiritual connections, social support, and exercise, just the pieces needed to support this new health care model. The use of CAM modalities without comprehensive wellness and positive lifestyle factors makes these modalities limited. This limited use results in the exclusion of many of the primary reasons CAM is so popular in the first place, ie: patient empowerment and effective treatments from practitioners willing to take the time to listen to their patients. In inclusion of CAM into conventional medical systems often highlights a variety of additional strengths, such as it provides minimalist, non-invasive approaches to early-stage and chronic health conditions, which often confounds the medical industry in an effort to effectively treat without high costs. Many aspects of CAM also meet criteria for safety, efficacy and cost-effectiveness. In addition, CAM is useful in addressing many of the leading trends of healthcare in the United States. CAM, thus, can enter the health care scene as a way to fill in holes that an integrative health system that is focused on lifestyle interventions, environmental factors, and genetic/biological factors, without reinventing the wheel. Looking forward, integrating CAM into current health care systems, therefore, requires a reassessment of our current strengths and weaknesses as a system, and will seek to develop a model where CAM and Biomedicine are complementary. This kind of synthesis, fortunately, is flexible and adept at addressing the complexity of today’s healthcare and health care cost challenges.
• 7 out of 10 deaths among Americans each year are from chronic diseases. Heart disease, cancer and stroke account for more than 50% of all deaths each year.
• In 2005, 133 million Americans – almost 1 out of every 2 adults – had at least one chronic illness.
• About one-fourth of people with chronic conditions have one or more daily activity limitations.
Many of these chronic diseases are preventable through simple diet, exercise, and healthy lifestyle choices. Clearly, there is a need for our health systems to shift from infection and acute and emergency trauma care towards medical and wellness care targeted at our 21st century health problems. While this does not call for an elimination of our evidence-based biomedical health care, it does call for an integration of biomedicine into health systems designed to address lifestyle modification and reduce environmental and genetic risk factors. According to the Institute of Medicine in their February 2009 Summary Report of Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public, “the interactions between an individual’s social, economic, psychological, and physical environments, and his or her biological susceptibility to illness and responsiveness to treatment; the nature of the care process, as well as its content; and the often greater health benefit to be had from certain “lower tech” interventions, rather than more costly approaches” are part of a bigger picture needed to create this new health care system. Unfortunately, these factors are often overlooked in our current health care system, which are necessary when working with chronic and preventable disease. The tools needed to move our health care system towards one that addresses lifestyle, environment, and genetics and takes into account environmental factors, biological susceptibility and responsiveness, the care process, and lower tech inventions are already at our finger tips. We have the technology to detect early risk factors, know the best preventative measures and lifestyle interventions needed, have a rich array of health care practices and theories of medicine, and we understand the motivations and interventions need to modify human behavior on both an individual and community wide scale.
The factors needed to refocus our health systems, however, are at times in direct conflict with major trends in health care. In an effort to address them as quickly as possible, often the most effective answer is considered too difficult to achieve (for reasons such as finances or logistics) or is simply missed because the patient interactions with the environment, biological susceptibility and responsiveness, the care process, and “lower tech” interventions are not utilized in solution assessments. Trends in individualized medicine, for example, tends to focus on complex and expensive treatment plans, when often a patient just wants an extra few minutes with the doctor, or just wants the pain to stop which could potentially be managed more effectively with greater cost savings with a service such as acupuncture. Patient demand for maximum level of care, again, also trends towards complex and expensive treatments. Ultimately, a patient wants to be heard and wants the problem to be fixed, and without addressing the root cause and instead focusing on fixing the problem once it has become broken, medical costs and frustration with ineffective and/or slow treatment results become common when treatment and interventions don’t work immediately. Direct consumer advertising of health care interventions and treatment options is also driving up costs because patients are demanding these products and services advertised and providers are at times under pressure to utilize certain products and services. When both provider and patient are under pressure to utilize the same products and services, the result is treatments that may not be the most effective and may be more costly, especially since direct consumer advertising focuses on new innovations and technology which are inherently more expensive. Since current health care financing control is not driven by price and patients are often unaware of the costs of products and services, the trend in direct consumer advertising has few checks and balances. Comprehensive disease management, however, is fortunately a trend that integrative health excels at addressing and this, perhaps, is one of the biggest factors in the growth of integrative health care.
Integration of Complementary and Alternative Medicine is a critical aspect of creating an integrative health care facility; however, the integration of CAM into contemporary western medical facilities, as if they were a few extra silos in the bunch, is not a viable model. CAM is unique is its delivery of care because care encompasses diet and nutrition, spiritual connections, social support, and exercise, just the pieces needed to support this new health care model. The use of CAM modalities without comprehensive wellness and positive lifestyle factors makes these modalities limited. This limited use results in the exclusion of many of the primary reasons CAM is so popular in the first place, ie: patient empowerment and effective treatments from practitioners willing to take the time to listen to their patients. In inclusion of CAM into conventional medical systems often highlights a variety of additional strengths, such as it provides minimalist, non-invasive approaches to early-stage and chronic health conditions, which often confounds the medical industry in an effort to effectively treat without high costs. Many aspects of CAM also meet criteria for safety, efficacy and cost-effectiveness. In addition, CAM is useful in addressing many of the leading trends of healthcare in the United States. CAM, thus, can enter the health care scene as a way to fill in holes that an integrative health system that is focused on lifestyle interventions, environmental factors, and genetic/biological factors, without reinventing the wheel. Looking forward, integrating CAM into current health care systems, therefore, requires a reassessment of our current strengths and weaknesses as a system, and will seek to develop a model where CAM and Biomedicine are complementary. This kind of synthesis, fortunately, is flexible and adept at addressing the complexity of today’s healthcare and health care cost challenges.
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