Brief

<p>Dr. Andrew Weil, Founder &amp; Program Director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, discussed the model of integrative healing and its great benefits in healthcare. He also discussed how governments can use integrative healing to combat modern diseases and improve healthcare, in light of the rise of health challenges.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Firstly, Dr. Weil stated that healthcare is the responsibility of governments, and that the economic challenge of healthcare threatens the stability of governments all over the world. He also emphasized that despite spending more and more on healthcare, health outcomes become even worse, which means that something is wrong with the way we manage healthcare. He said that our current healthcare systems are disease management systems, and that we need to turn them into disease prevention and health promotion systems. Moreover, while high-tech medicine is efficient in treating trauma and crises, it is unable to manage chronic diseases and illnesses related to modern lifestyle choices such as obesity, hypertension, and type-2 diabetes. He added that we are currently witnessing a great change in patters of disease in our culture.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Secondly, he explained five fundamentals of the integrative medicine model. He said that the model places great emphasis on the potential of human organs to self-heal. The model also focuses on the fact that humans are not just physical beings, but also emotional, spiritual, and community members. This moves away from conventional medicine&rsquo;s assumption that all physical diseases have physical causes. He also said that the model looks at all the aspects of lifestyle, including how people eat, how they handle stress, how they sleep, and others. Another fundamental of the model is ensuring that sufficient time is allocated to the interaction between physician and patient. Furthermore, a crucial point Dr. Weis iterated was the need to incorporate traditional medicine systems and treatments, that have been proven to be effective in the new model. He noted that this does not mean ignoring pharmacological therapy, but only using it when necessary.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Finally, Dr. Weil talked about the challenges facing the application of the model of integrative medicine, namely the difficulty to ensure funding and enough participants for comparative research purposes. He also mentioned the losses that the insurance and medicine sectors would suffer if the model replaces traditional medicine and healthcare systems.</p>

Speakers

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