The Future Is In The Integration Of Complementary Therapies

The World Health Organization (WHO) approved a strategy, for the years 2014 to 2023, that promotes the integration of traditional and complementary medicines in public health systems.

The integrative medicine care wishes and physical and emotional needs of patients. It is a more individualized medicine, which is already being introduced in public and private hospitals thanks to pioneering professionals, such as the three doctors we have interviewed.

Dra. Odile Fernández: “Natural therapies that have proven their usefulness should be integrated”

Odile Fernández is a family doctor, author of My Anticancer Recipes (Ed. Urano) and a survivor of metastatic ovarian cancer.

─Do you think that the campaigns against natural medicines will keep citizens away from them?
Absolutely not. Patients are empowering themselves and are demanding individualized care and that is the future: multidisciplinary and integrative care.

─What could the integration of complementary therapies in the public system contribute?
─In my point of view, the health system should integrate or subsidize natural therapies that have shown their usefulness for the sick.

Professionals who provide these therapies should have formal training. And medical, nursing, psychology, and physical therapy curricula should include training in integrative therapies. It would also ask the government to invest in studies that reveal the effectiveness of these therapies.

─Can natural medicines improve the health of the population and reduce health costs?
─In Germany, Italy and Switzerland, it has been shown that savings are made with the introduction of these therapies in the health system.

In Italy they have shown that complementary medicine to treat the breech position and pain associated with childbirth saves 24% of caesarean sections in the first case and 108 euros per pregnant woman in the treatment of pain.

Surveys carried out show that the population is satisfied with the care received.

Dra. Natalia Eres: “The best medicine is the one that expands consciences”

The doctor Natalia You specializes in integrative oncology and is the head of the Institute of Holistic Medicine and Oncology (IMOHE).

─How do you assess the current relationship between conventional and unconventional medicines?
─It is a time of great opportunity for everyone.

It tests our conviction regarding what we do, it forces professionals and users to reflect deeply on aspects such as: What is science? What is medicine? What is health? What is our responsibility and our rights in all this? What place do we occupy in society and why is there “someone” who has to tell us what we should or should not think and do?

─There is a dispute over who can take care of the health.
─Health is not the heritage of science or medicine, it is the heritage of humanity and, in fact, not only man but the entire planet deserves it.

So, for now, the best medicine is one that expands consciousness towards global health.

─What is the reason for the campaign against natural therapies?
─If there is a fundamental reason for the current campaign against complementary medicines, it is because we do not take responsibility as citizens, both users and many opinion leaders and the media, who could give voice to another reality and do not .

This campaign will show us how committed and aware citizens are about what medicine and what society they want for themselves and their children.

─Do we have to better regulate natural therapies?
─Of course. In order to establish the guidelines, one must first ask what is natural medicine, what is chemical medicine, what is environmental medicine and what does public health, mutual and private financing imply.

─Is not scientific medicine irrefutable?
─We must start from the basis that medicine (chemical or natural) is not a basic science, it is a combination of applied science and an empirical method based on knowledge that gives experience on something as inaccurate as a human being is continuously interaction with its environment.

You have to sit down with humility and openness and recognize that chemical medicine does not always operate on the basis of scientific evidence, and that its benefits are not always for the patient, and that the price we pay for its toxicity is not always exceeded by its benefits. .

─Is everything good in natural medicine?
─It contains anthropological aspects that are valuable when it comes to restoring health, which does not mean that anything is worth it.

In natural medicine science is often used for pseudoscientific marketing; Natural medicine laboratories often serve the same master as conventional laboratories, we must not forget it.

Dr. Juan Carlos Durán: “Care must be global”

Dr. Juan Carlos Durán practices integrative medicine at the San Roque Hospitals (Las Palmas).

─Is the efficacy of integrative medicine proven ?
─Neurosciences and psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology have provided evidence on the biochemical relationships between the body and the mind.

These relationships justify that the treatment is comprehensive and that it includes lifestyle habits, especially food and rest, as well as psychological or emotional factors.

─How do you practice it?
─I coordinate a multidisciplinary integrative medicine team and we work with cancer patients, after being evaluated and treated by oncologists, surgeons and radiotherapists, within the Oncology Program of Excellence of Hospitals San Roque in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

─And apart from cancer?
─We can treat chronic pathologies where conventional medicine shows its limitations.

This is the case of fibromyalgia, degenerative or autoimmune diseases. We counteract the effects of stress, providing the patient with tools such as yoga, tai chi, meditation, relaxation and cardiac coherence to regain balance.