What does Integrative Medicine mean to me?
Over the years, one of the most common questions I get asked is, what is Integrative medicine? I thought answering my version in my first blog would be most appropriate. During the course of my 5-year medical degree, my first choice specialty was always Accident and Emergency medicine. This was way before the days of TV shows like ER and Grays Anatomy. The dynamic nature of that department just felt right for my personality. The shift work at that time didn’t phase me either. There was just something about being up all night with the buzz of that emergency room and the comradery amongst the team that really attracted me.
In my final year at medical school, my dad suffered a cardiac arrest, and was subsequently in a coma for 18 days. The ambulance that night arrived with no oxygen, and the first ever pacemaker in that hospital was placed in my dad. Unfortunately for us, even with being surrounded by medicine, his colleagues, no amount of science or knowledge would save him. Over the duration of those three weeks of being the relative proved to be somewhat instrumental in changing my career path. As a newly qualified doctor, just 9 months later, I struggled with some of the unfortunate limitations of modern medicine. I felt I never had enough time to listen to the patients, to talk to the relatives, know my patients’ names as not just bed numbers and we junior doctors were expected to develop the mental strength to be able to cope with the nature of hospital medicine.
In order to break away from morbid aspects of hospital clinical medicine and being sporty myself, I decided to do a Masters in Sports Medicine. This allowed me to learn and focus, in depth, diagnosis and treatment of musculoskeletal injuries. In order to expand my understanding in sports performance I undertook further studies to become a strength and conditioning coach, under the late Charles Poliquin. This enabled me to program design and implement advanced training methods for athletes in a multitude of sports. This also allowed for better connections to my sporting patients.
An important aspect of performance programming is managing athletic body composition. I became interested in the concept correlating ones body composition and fat distribution to ones’ current health and physiology. I retrained in Nutritional therapy, furthering my understanding of lifestyle practices, the process of diseases and potential strategies for chronic diseases management. Through all this education and experience, I formed my version of an Integrative Medicine practice that I have now had for over 12 years.
My approach to the long-term management of chronic diseases requires searching for the root cause. It’s a 360 degree view of a person, understanding that all their bodily systems coexist in the same body and speak to each other and can be affected by each other. In a medical system run by specialists with severe time constraints, ones’ ability to search for root cause isn’t also easy, especially difficult when true root cause isn’t necessarily a part of their specialty. Any acute symptoms need to initially be managed safely by the conventional medical system. My knowledge of that allows me to identify the patients’ priority and removes him/her from the “danger zone”. Integrative Medicine allows for the holistic approach to a patients’ presenting complaints while being able to give the necessary amount of time to get as many details as possible while keeping them safe.