By Kirsti Frazier, MA

Health plans and health systems are uniquely positioned to leverage the advantages of caring for the whole person, connecting body, mind, and spirit. With value-based and accountable care, your organization may be managing under-risk contracts, prioritizing resources to avoid penalties, working to reduce costs, and focusing on reducing readmission rates caused by co-morbidities. Adopting holistic practices can help your organization accomplish these goals.

Holistic medicine treats the whole person. This means that a person’s health includes not only physical dimensions but the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions as well. In addition to these individual factors, holistic medicine takes into account the influences of one’s relationships, culture, and physical environment.

From the perspective of holistic medicine, any approach that leaves out a dimension of the whole person is partial by definition. As such, focusing exclusively on the physical illness, as is done in traditional Western Medicine, is not the most effective method of treatment.

Richard Nahin, PhD, MPH, and his team at the National Center for Health Statistics, recently examined health data from more than 44,000 individuals and extrapolated this data to the US population. Nahin’s report estimated that “59 million persons aged 4 years and over had at least one expenditure for some type of complementary health approach, resulting in total out-of-pocket expenditures of $30.2 billion.”^[1]  According to a government study, 36 percent of US adults practice some form of complementary or alternative medicine. ^[2] Also, in formative research conducted by CredibleMind, 83 percent of respondents expressed a moderate to high interest in spiritual growth.

It’s no surprise why so many Americans are expanding their horizons and pursuing a more holistic approach. Let’s look at an example.

In the traditional Western approach to medicine, if one sees a doctor for persistent migraines, the doctor is likely to focus only on physical factors. That means that he or she is unlikely to explore powerful mental, emotional, and even spiritual influences that might also be affecting an individual’s sense of well-being. As a result of this more limited paradigm, the traditionally trained doctor is likely to prescribe preventive and pain medicine. Both of these approaches treat the headaches in isolation.

From the perspective of holistic and complementary medicine, these approaches may fail to get to the root of the problem. To help explain the physical symptoms, a holistic approach might inquire into the role of stress, work environment, emotional suppression, and diet as potential contributing factors to the headaches. If any one of these factors lies at the causative root of the migraines, no matter how much the symptoms are treated and effectively controlled, the headaches won’t resolve until the underlying issues are addressed.

The trend toward more use of holistic and complementary medicine is growing fast. Here are two illustrative examples from the National Institutes of Health.

In just five years, there’s been a substantial increase in the practice of yoga in the US as a form of complementary health. The number of US adults practicing yoga grew from 9.5 percent to 14.3 percent between 2012 and 2017.^[3] Among women diagnosed with PTSD, a 2014 study showed that 10 weeks of yoga significantly reduced PTSD symptoms; 52 percent of the women who practiced yoga no longer met the criteria for PTSD compared to 21 percent in the control group.^[4]

The use of mediation has also grown dramatically among US adults. Between 2012 and 2017, meditation use grew from 4.1 percent to 14.2 percent. ^[5] And there are no signs that these trends are slowing down anytime soon.  A randomized controlled study of 90 college students diagnosed with anxiety and/or depression found that both meditation and yoga significantly reduced symptoms.

It’s an excellent sign that the tide is changing. With one in three Americans practicing complementary approaches and an ever-growing number of people picking up holistic practices like yoga and meditation, the demand for doctors and healthcare professionals to be informed by more comprehensive strategies is increasing.

As a result, many formally trained medical doctors have sought additional certification as naturopathic physicians, allowing them to consider alternative treatments and approaches, many of which are now evidence-based. And there has been a flood of new research validating the use of holistic approaches to health. Scientifically supported approaches to holistic medicine now include acupuncture for addiction and anxiety, reiki for ADHD, breathwork for bipolar disorder, CBD for tobacco addiction, exercise and certain herbal remedies for depression, meditation for anxiety, stress, and sleep, yoga for childbirth and chronic pain, and many more alternative modalities for physical concerns.

As the virtues of holistic medicine are more fully studied and understood, more people will feel empowered to demand a wider range of options to optimize their health and wellbeing. Organizations willing to stand behind holistic approaches to medicine will find themselves ahead of the curve in the years to come.

^[1] www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr095.pdf

^{[2] www.verywellhealth.com/alternative-medicine-usage-in-the-us-88732}

^[3] www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2018/201811_Yoga_Meditation.htm

^[4]  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25004196

^[5] www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2018/201811_Yoga_Meditation.htm