Supporting Optimum Health and Healing 
by using regular “Stress Hygiene”

 The Future of Alternative Medicine?

What is the definition of “Optimum Health” and what is its relationship to “Healing”?  As health care professionals, how does our individual success in maintaining our own health affect our capacity as “Healers”.  Intuition (as well as research studies) would suggest, plenty.

Our own daily level of emotional and physical health affects our “emotional intelligence”, or those elusive intuitive and common sense abilities which affect the quality of the moment to moment decisions we make throughout our workday. Being tired, stressed, upset or distracted by less than optimal physical or emotional health, clearly affects our capacity to fulfill our responsibilities and may result in errors that are harmful or even potentially life threatening.

 The other issue is less easily measured, but I feel, very important. We’ve all known people who cause us to either feel elated, inspired or experience other positive emotions.  I’m sure we can also recall others we’ve spent time with who cause us to feel drained, depressed,  apathetic, anxious or tend towards other “negative” emotions. Part of my personal goal in learning and practicing “alternative therapy” approaches is to raise what Buddhists refer to as my “life condition”. It is my assertion that you as nurses, don’t need to learn or even recommend, esoteric “healing practices” in order to have a significant effect upon your patients.

An interesting study in which mothers were taught a simple massage or healing touch type technique to perform on their premature infants, resulted in a measurably significant decrease in length of hospital stay for those infants who experienced that, versus control infants who were treated in the traditional way.  I suspect that a hospital which has employees who manage to achieve “optimum” health through various approaches, would likely result in similar improvement of health of adults. I would venture to suggest that the measure of  “patient satisfaction” that Delnor uses to evaluate their performance, may also have real and potentially measurable health benefits for the patients cared for here.

The following list of alternative therapies include those which I have either experienced, or am currently pursuing proficiency in during my ongoing personal education related to alternative medicine. I share them with you to expose you to their existence, and to stimulate any questions you might have concerning a particular therapeutic approach I might be familiar with.  First, however, some general issues:

What is the real definition of alternative medicine?  In this country allopathic or traditional Western medicine would currently be considered the norm. In the past, homeopathy or the use of minute amounts of medication developed, in part due to a concern that allopathic medicine was causing great harm in its aggressive stance toward healing. The AMA was developed in response to the lack of consistency in traditional medicine and a rampant quackery abounding advances the time.  Since that time, the advances of knowledge and technology in medicine have been extraordinary.

However, in the last 10 years especially, the interest in alternative medicine approaches by the public has been accelerating to the point where now the out of pocket expenditures on complementary therapies is exceeding out-of-pocket expenditures on traditional medical therapy.

In Dr. Andrew Weil’s book, Spontaneous Healing, he speaks of different philosophies of health care as used in ancient Greece.  Dr. Weil distinguishes two discrete approaches.   The doctors who worked under the patronage of  Asclepias, the God of Medicine, felt that obtaining health required outside intervention of one sort or another.  Conversely, healers who served Asclepias’ daughter, Hygieia, the Goddess of Health, felt that optimum health resulted from living in harmony with natural law.  The former emphasized attacking disease while the latter emphasized increasing one’s level of health and therefore increasing the chances of one never becoming ill or easily overcoming illness with one’s own internal immune system.  Traditional Chinese medicine is probably the most comprehensive example of the latter. 

Some of the limitations of constantly attacking disease as the followers of Asclepias would practice are as follows:  We are now developing resistant bacteria which are commonplace, especially in larger hospitals.  These bacteria are beginning to develop resistance to many antibiotics partly as a result of overuse of these in the general community.  In a 1998 JAMA article, it was estimated that 100,000 hospitalized patients die yearly resulting from pharmaceutical drugs prescribed in the correct dose for the correct conditions.  Also, despite modern science’s best efforts to do evidence based medicine, it is estimated that fewer than 30% of procedures used in conventional medicine have been adequately tested.  We in the United States perform many, many more CABG procedures as compared to other countries such as Canada or England. However, frequency of cardiac deaths is quite similar in all three.  There is a saying that  “When you have a hammer, the whole world begins to look like a nail”.   Physicians like myself, trained in the traditional Western medical school, tend to have a fairly single minded approach to health care.  Despite the previous lack of formal education in this manner however, things have begun to shift.  Physicians in general are now at least aware of some alternative practices which may, at least, be less dangerous than some conventional, modern medical approaches.

It is estimated that in 1997, 12 billion dollars was spent on vitamins and herbal products in the United States.  The total amount of money spent on alternative medical care is beginning to compete with the total amount spent on conventional health care.  One of my old, somewhat cynical professors used to frequently quote “E = E”  or “Ethics = Economy”.  At the time, this was in reference to cardiac surgery which at the time had little data to support its overly frequent use.  But this could also be easily applied to the current practice of alternative medicine.  In 1994, Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act which in effect allowed unregulated distribution and sale of all herbal products, regulated only to the degree that they call themselves a dietary supplement and make only vague, general claims supporting health.  Consumer Report measured various brands of Ginseng and found dose levels varying as much as 1000%.   Often bottle to bottle consistency even within the same brand was quite variable.

Also alternative health care practitioners sometimes don’t recognize the limits of their ability as exemplified by a recent experience of mine.  A patient was continuing to undergo alternative medicine with Acupuncture, pressure points and herbals which caused diarrhea which nearly resulted in the patient’s death.   The expression about having the hammer and thinking the whole world is a nail also applies to alternative medicine practitioners. I don’t believe approach “alternative” or “natural” therapy with the same reverence, or even fanaticism applied to religions is the answer either.  Fortunately, here in the United States, patients have an option of multiple therapeutic modalities.   The challenge remains for both patient and health care provider alike to decide on the optimum approach to maximum health.