Chronicles of Health Creation: RAND Report Begs New Look at Integrative Medicine and Health Professionals in the Triple Aim Era

Are you a thing or are you a human? If someone wishes to assess your potential contributions to this life we live, what is the best starting assumption: thing or human? The questions may seem silly. But a recent report from the RAND Corporation bores in on how regular medicine reduced complementary and alternative medicine professionals to "thing" status -- as "modalities" -- in the first years of the integrative medicine era. The title of the report is "Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Professions or Modalities?" The discussions among policy makers, practitioners and delivery system leaders synthesized in the 75-page document beg a more significant question: Does the emergence of values-based medicine urge a major re-think regarding the potential contributions of these professionals? The case statement by RAND's Patricia Herman, ND, PhD and Ian Coulter, PhD begins with a blunt irony. "One of the hallmarks of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is treatment of the whole person." Yet in the fee-for-service procedure and production orientation of the medical industry, licensed practitioners of chiropractic, acupuncture and Oriental medicine, and naturopathic medicine were typically stripped of this core value -- treating the whole person -- before being put to any use. Regular medicine's dominant influence when "CAM" integration by medical delivery organizations began in the mid-1990s was the industrial value of service production. Mayo Clinic's dir...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news