Working with Integrative Health Care Providers

The integrative medicine paradigm holds great promise in solving many of the problems that plague American health care. With its focus on prevention, patient empowerment, interpersonal relations, and relatively low-cost therapies that positively affect multiple organ systems with few adverse effects, the integrative approach is exactly what we need to remedy a system that all-too-often fails patients, frustrates doctors and fosters financial ruin.

There are signs that mainstream medicine is moving in this direction. Nearly all of the nation’s medical schools now have coursework in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM); most major medical centers have affiliated holistic health clinics. The Bravewell Collaborative, a philanthropy founded by Christy and John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Penny and Bill George of Medtronic, has funded clinical research as well as health systems development at integrative medical centers across the nation.

Continuing medical education programs on nutrition and other aspects of natural medicine are blossoming. The growth of groups such as the Institute of Functional Medicine, American College for Advancement in Medicine and others attest to this, as do the emergence of the American Board of Holistic Medicine and the American Clinical Board of Nutrition, offering doctors formal certification in holistic disciplines. In an historic first, the American Holistic Medical Association (representing holistically minded M.D.s and D.O.s) and the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians are holding a joint annual meeting.

Even the American Academy of Family Physicians, a historically conservative medical organization, has stepped up its education efforts; last year’s annual conference featured several well-attended talks on nutrition, functional medicine and stress management. Many practitioner-channel nutraceutical companies were there among the pharma giants on the exhibit floor, something one did not see 10 years ago.

Health practitioner supplement sales are growing, according to data published in Nutrition Business Journal. From 1997 to 2004 (the last year for which we have data), there was a 100-fold increase in practitioner channel sales, from $720 million to $1.44 billion. That figure continues to grow at about 10 percent per year. The biggest growth is among M.D.s, nurses, and massage therapists. Supplement sales by M.D.s and nurses increased by 874 percent, from $15.5 million in 1997 to $151 million in 2004. But the biggest growth was among massage therapists, who sold $72.6 million worth of supplements in 2004, up from just $6.6 million in 1997.

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