WHAT IS INTEGRATED HEALTH?

Heart disease costs the USA $200 billion per year and is their number one killer disease. It is largely preventable under integrated health.

Integrated health is the gathering together of all the factors that contribute to your continued well-being and balancing them to enable you to attain your full potential all the time. This takes the form of preventive measures to ensure your maximum freedom from disease and adverse conditions; the most advantageous curative procedures in the event of your falling ill, using the best of all the traditional and conventional techniques; and optimising your condition to take advantage of your full potential.

I am a conventional doctor, who followed the normal syllabus, did a couple of years of postgraduate studies, and had the regular one-year internship. I have been in practice for over 20 years. That's all very usual. But in addition I have studied naturopathy, homeopathy, Indian traditional Unani and Ayurvedic medicine, traditional massage techniques, bone setting, Marma therapy and traditional Chinese medicine including acupuncture. I have mastered diagnosis through the pulse, iris and tongue -indeed, there are few forms of medicine in the world that I have not culled for their usefulness in these modern times. I am learning all the time.

Much of traditional medicine has been handed down from physician to physician and family to family for thousands of years. Its value lies in the wealth of experience

gained over that time in harnessing the healing power of the body itself and empowering it to maintain health and correct imbalance caused by sickness. It was only some 300 years ago that medicine sought to employ science to bypass the practical experience that formed the basis of traditional medicine, and to provide an alternative which could be established quickly. Curiously the new medicine became known as 'conventional' and the old is now treated as an alternative, which has caused much confusion among patients and physicians alike. Traditional medicine remains the lifeblood of our profession.

I believe that there is much to be gained by combining all forms of medicine into an integrated whole, so gaining the best of all worlds. It is obvious to me that conventional medicine, as it is now known, has outstanding advantages for acute specific illnesses, while traditional and complementary medicine often outshine it when dealing with chronic ailments and conditions caused by a combination of factors (multifactorial conditions). Besides, modern technology has made conventional medicine cripplingly expensive and making the best use of traditional medicine may be the only way to sustain health services globally.

In my experience 80 per cent of everyday illnesses do not need the attention of a doctor. In order to release doctors from this unnecessary load and give them time to deal with complex cases the public needs to be well-informed on how to deal with these common ailments.

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