It was estimated by the end of 1997 that 18 separate insurance companies around the country would cover holistic treatments like homeopathy, chiropractic, and herbal medicine. Oxford Health Plans made the front page of the Wall Street Journal in October of 1996, when they announced they would establish a network of 1,000 holistic providers. Another managed care plan, Community Health Plan (CHP), gave credit to its certified nurse midwives for bringing the plan's cesarean-section rate down to 15 percent—almost 10 percent lower than the national average.
Forging A New Kind Of Medicine
But change has not always come easily, especially for the doctors forging integrated medicine. "Mainstream derision of anything new is so fierce that you have to be very secure and have a great sense of humor in order to hold your ground and still maintain the respect of your colleagues," says Christiane Northrup, M.D., an obstetrician-gynecologist in Yarmouth, Maine, who blends traditional medicine with nutrition, homeopathy, and energy medicine, including intuitive diagnosis and healing. Dr. Northrup believes medicine is undergoing a massive cultural shift. "We're the crossover doctors, and what we're all being confronted with is how conventional and alternative medicine can help each other. Twenty years ago, I used to have to close my door when I talked to a patient about nutrition for fear my colleagues would hear me. Now that information is on the front page of the New York Times. But there's still a great deal of resistance to change. For example, the drug taxol, which costs about $5,000 per course of ovarian cancer treatment, received tremendous attention because it lengthens life by several months. Around the same time, an impeccable mind-body study on women with metastatic breast cancer, published in the Lancet in 1989, found that women who went to a support group lived an average of 18 months longer than women who didn't. That study received far less attention. If support groups were a drug, it would be considered unethical not to use them in every case of illness."
Dr. Northrup came to alternative medicine by way of her own experience. While growing up, she suffered from chronic migraine headaches and at age 13 was hospitalized for a week. It wasn't until she was 19 that she understood her headaches were stress-related and that her stress was self-induced, triggered by her hard-driving type A personality. That perception alone, she says, seemed to shift her out of biochemical overdrive. Now 47, she has had only three headaches in the last 28 years. "We don't change unless we're personally touched by something," Dr. Northrup says.
Elliot Dacher, M.D., author of Whole Healing, was director of the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan in Washington, D.C., from 1975 to 1983. In 1985, Dr. Dacher's romantic relationship ended and he developed ulcerative colitis. He decided to quit his job and spent the next year on his own healing. He took a colitis drug that at the time was experimental and regularly went for guided visualization sessions where he was asked to create images for his sense of emptiness and despair. During one session, Dr. Dacher says he felt a "profound joy and ecstasy, a sense of oneness and connectedness with all things." So while the drug may have helped quiet his colitis, Dr. Dacher believes visualization is what turned his life around. As a result, he says, he was able to go back and practice medicine "in a deeper, richer way."
Suffering patients are another catalyst that inspires doctors to seek out less-traditional methods of medicine. "I was seeing patients who'd had one heart attack after another," recalls Bruno Cortis, M.D., a cardiologist who founded the Exceptional Heart Patients Program in River Forest, Illinois, and is the author of Heart & Soul. "I cried when I saw people dying," he says. "Doctors cry alone most of the time and don't share that experience."
To combat heart disease—Dr. Cortis says the disease takes a life every 34 seconds in this country—he suggests patients follow his program which, in addition to conventional medication and surgery, includes lifestyle and dietary changes, support groups, meditation, spirituality, and self-empowerment. "The number of patients interested in this approach is small," says Dr. Cortis, "but I believe they are the most fortunate ones."
Like Dr. Cortis, many crossover physicians work with their patients, discussing options and arriving at treatment plans together. "Sometimes it feels like a mind meld," says Firshein. "I encourage my patients to bring me information from articles, books, and television shows. If I haven't heard of a particular treatment, I'll research it. It's like having thousands of eyes instead of just your own."
Edward Linkner, M.D., a physician in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who teaches holistic medicine to medical students, interns, and residents at the University of Michigan, agrees. He says he often takes time to meditate with his patients. "I assume that each patient has something to teach me," he says. "When both patient and doctor are healed by an encounter, that encounter is complete."
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