Integrator Blog News & Reports

Integration, by nature, asks us to open our peripheral visions. We are served to look at the whole of the field. We need to develop new fascia, new connectivity. Opportunities crop up in new places. The Integrator Blog News and Reports is meant to provide you with information, insights and tools to enhance integrated care in the environment you serve.

- John Weeks, publisher-editor

Appointments in the Obama Era: What's Up for Integrative Medicine and Health Freedom?

Obama transition watchers have noted a number of nominations which may bode well, or ill, for the integrative practice community and natural products industry. Most give a thumbs up to appointments for former U.S. Senators Tom Daschle and U.S. Senator Tom Harkin. Congressman Henry Waxman, who has taken over a key role in the House, is a cause of concern for some. Meantime, leading "health freedom" advocates believe that the sky may be falling with the Democratic majorities: writer Peter Chowka forecasts that we may be witnessed "the end of alternative medicine" and health freedoms. Here is a run-down with comments from members of the community. The stage is first set with a Cliff's Notes review of action under Clinton and Bush.
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Historic Alliance: Integrative Practice Groups Unite Behind Congressional Resolution Promoting Wellness

A medical reform movement is afoot in the integrative practice community. The present goal is as powerful as it is sublime: Tell Congress that, whatever healthcare reform efforts are undertaken, wellness must be included. The focal point of the current campaign is House Concurrent Resolution 406 (H.Con.Res.406) introduced by US Representative Jim Langevin (D-RI). H.Con.Res.406 expresses “the sense of Congress that any effort to reengineer the health care system in the United States should incorporate sustainable wellness programs that address the underlying causal factors associated with chronic disease.” Is this something the AOM community should back?
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Where the $120 Goes and Where it Would Best Serve

[From my Integrative Practitioner column] When my neighbor and colleague Tom Ballard, RN, ND, a primary care physician in the Seattle marketplace, sent me a letter-to-the-editor he'd had published in the Seattle Times, I began thinking about a hopeful, practical research agenda for NCCAM. Ballard wrote to the editor that an article on MRSA failed to note the contribution to the problem via our overuse of antibiotics. Ballard concluded: “Perhaps the crisis of MRSA will help swing the medical pendulum back toward a whole-systems approach to infections: First strengthen the host and utilize natural compounds, saving drug therapy for last." I took Ballard's hope and upped it a notch: Might the new focus on effectiveness research by incumbent NCCAM director Josephine Briggs, MD provide us an opportunity to frame far more interesting questions, such as Ballard suggests, and yield significant individual and population benefits from NCCAM's work?
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Why Integrative Practice is Missing from the Health Reform Debate

I take it as an assumption among integrative medicine and natural healthcare practitioners that they agree on one strongly held, if ill-formed, policy notion: Health care would be better with more of what we do. Most assert that their type of care would ultimately cost less, too. Naturally then, any true healthcare reform would include more of them, and be organized around their whole person, patient-centered healing principles. I’ve operated with a notion like this for 25 years. Then why is integrative practice missing from the health reform rebate?
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Resources

Integrator Archive by Subject for January-June 2007
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Integrator Archive by Subject for 2006: All Hot-linked
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