Transforming Medicine: An Historic Event

[Celebration]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-dean-ornish/transforming-medicine-an_b_170421.html

Dr. Ralph Snyderman is Chancellor Emeritus of Duke University and chair of the Institute of Medicine's "Summit on Integrative Medicine" at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The Summit s a 2-1/2 day historic event in which some of the most thoughtful and important thinkers are coming together to envision a system that can more effectively improve our health and well-being, integrating the best of traditional and non traditional approaches in healing. These approaches may play an important part in President Obama's health reform legislation.

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Yes, but where I have difficulties in my own mind is the difference between something being scientifically proven and being intuitively obvious. For example, the issue of caring and compassion--does that need to be scientifically proven? When an individual is dealing with a very difficult problem and if we're thinking about their health approach during that problem--the importance of maintaining will, motivation, empowerment--and the encouragement one could get from support groups or from mindfulness meditation, or from participating in yoga or from receiving acupuncture if the belief is that acupuncture may be helping with the particular problem--is that CAM or is that conventional, or is it common sense? Is it necessary to prove everything if the therapy itself causes no harm but allows the individual to feel empowered and motivated?

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I think that there is at some times a glaring lack of open-mindedness on the part of individuals that have come up in the same system that I have come up in--the scientific approach to understanding the pathophysiology of disease and the thought that everything that needs to be done or should be done should be scientifically proven. That is almost a religious belief that if we look at what is actually being done, we're not particularly responding to that belief.

There are certain things that the medical enterprise tends to accept, whereas some people within the system react very negatively to things that are outside of the system. And I do think that on the part of some there is a double standard--that there is an immediate skepticism and rejection of things that would come into the system without it having grown up within the system.

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I think one of the biggest misconceptions that has emerged in our society is the delegation of healthcare responsibility from an individual to the so-called health care system. "I don't need to worry about this anymore. It'll be taken care of for me." That is wrong. There is virtually no condition other than acute, emergency conditions where the individual may or may not play very much of a role--everything else, health promotion, wellness, disease minimization, even treatment of complex diseases requires a tremendous involvement on the part of the individual.