Whole-person health care

When talking about whole-person health care, the terminology itself can be confusing, misleading, and laden with New-Age stigmas. But use a different word--integrative. Integrative medicine combines the best in traditional health care. It seeks to treat illness with medication and/or medical procedures, with non-traditional research- and outcome-based therapies that fall into a category commonly called complementary/alternative medicine, or CAM.

The idea behind integrative medicine is not for people to forego the appropriate traditional treatments in favor of CAM therapies, says Tracy Gaudet, director of the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine (DCIM), but to complement these treatments with techniques that address the multiple components of whole-person care--including body, mind, nutrition, movement, and spirit.

This philosophy clearly rings familiar with many Americans: Nearly half have pursued CAM therapies at one time or another. And for this, Gaudet cites two primary reasons: first, because there are therapies and approaches that have been proven beneficial in helping people prevent and fight illness, but have fallen outside mainstream medicine; and second, because "a large cultural shift is afoot in which people want to be seen as more than just diseased body parts--they want to be understood and treated as the whole entities they are." (author abstract)

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