What Does it mean to Provide Integrative or Alternative Medicine?
Western Medicine
Imagine you have a terrible symptom of some kind. How would you make decisions to navigate the medical system? Maybe you choose to go to the ER or to a primary care physician. If you do, you’ll encounter a very specific history and structure of medicine. Medical students are in school for four years during which they are trained to practice medicine in many different specialities. Physicians know what each specialty can provide and they are able to provide referrals or ask for help within their networks. This whole system is based on a specific way of looking at the human body that has both strengths and weaknesses. And with this perspective, decisions are made which in turn need to be justified to insurance companies which are also integral to this method of establishing health.
Alternative/Integrative/Holistic Medicine
Because this is an alternative system, it currently is not able to serve everyone equally. If this alternative system was required to provide healthcare to all, it would likely encounter many of the same problems we see today with our existing system - a shortage of time for visits, mandates by insurance companies, intertwining with pharmaceutical companies. There is no centralized formal process that an individual must go through to become a care provider because there are so many different paths. Training might include five hundred hours of massage, thousands of hours of acupuncture, certificate programs, continuing education, formal degrees, or in some cases, nothing at all. There are no alternative emergency rooms and there aren’t enough highly skilled practitioners or funding to establish holistic primary care systems for everyone.
For some, the reality of the alternative system may seem chaotic and unnerving, but this format lends itself to the greatest strength of the integrative care system: careful, prolonged, and comprehensive attention to each individual it interacts with.
So let’s return to our initial scenario and imagine that the symptom is severe neck pain. Naturally, you’ll ask, should I see an occupational therapist, a doctor, a massage therapist, an acupuncturist, a shiatsu practitioner, or buy a new kind of pillow? Answering this question involves investing time and money and it involves trusting whichever choice you make to help you feel better. That trust can be scary and being afraid of wasting time and money and having more pain are all valid concerns.
What we can offer at Enso is the opportunity to talk directly with highly trained practitioners at length and for us to listen. In this integrative model, because we get to spend quality time with each patient, you tell us what you’re going through and we will either apply one of our approaches in a way that helps you or we will refer you to someone else in the Bozeman community who can. We try to empower each client so that they receive the most helpful treatment possible.
At the core, we ask for your trust. Perhaps the most important part of your journey toward health is your firm belief and faith that the process you engage in can have the outcome you desire.
At Enso our intention is to awaken human potential by empowering individual wellbeing through the integration of modern medicine and traditional healing wisdom. So this year, as practitioners, we will use this blog to share ourselves with you. We will try to help you understand what we can offer, the kind of work we do, how we approach the body, and how we think about health.
