Note: This is a guest post that is part of the discussion on the Summit on Integrative Medicine
It was not your usual Senate hearing. Testifying on behalf of integrative medicine before Senators Harkin, Mikulski and Enzi at the Senate HELP Committee were four leading physicians: Mehmet Oz, Dean Ornish, Andrew Weil and Mark Hyman. Testifying on behalf of the status quo was … no one! That’s an unusual set-up on Capitol Hill, where panels are usually set up to represent “both points of view.” Lobbyists for the medical establishment were present to watch the proceedings and plot their next steps, but they didn’t have a seat at the table. Not this time, anyway.
By any measure, it was a watershed week: the Feb. 26 HELP Committee hearing was the second in four days to focus on integrative medicine. And the very next day, Sen. Harkin traveled across town to the Institute of Medicine, to address the 500-strong Summit on Integrative Medicine.
“Clearly, the time has come to ‘think anew’ and to ‘disenthrall ourselves’ from the dogmas and biases that have made our current health care system – based overwhelmingly on conventional medicine – in so many ways wasteful and dysfunctional,” Harkin told both groups, borrowing some quotes from President Lincoln’s 1862 address to Congress.
“It is time to end the discrimination against alternative health care practices. It’s time for America’s health care system to emphasize coordination and continuity of care, patient-centeredness, and prevention. And it’s time to adopt an integrative approach that takes advantage of the very best scientifically based medicines and therapies, whether conventional or alternative.”
Speaking to the IOM Summit on Monday, Harkin said, “I have just four words for you: Our time has come!” He added that IOM visitors to Washington might think “it looks like the same old Washington, but it’s not.”
Yet Harkin warned the IOM participants that the real work of serious health reform is still ahead of us. “Just because what we’re talking about here is the most common sense, most cost-effective kind of medicine doesn’t mean it’s a done deal,” he said. “Nothing in Washington is a done deal.”
Even though the “status quo is broken and wasteful” to the tune of $2.1 billion, Harkin said, “the ‘stagnant quo’ is still” very powerful and very much alive. “There are forces that will defend allopathic medicine with all their power,” Harkin said. “It’s human nature.”
“We pay trillions for surgery but peanuts for prevention,” he added, noting that only 5 cents of every health care dollar is spent on prevention. “We are happy to pay for amputation” for diabetes patients, but there is almost no re-imbursement for nutrition and prevention. “The time has come to think of outcomes and quality, and to reimburse for that,” Harkin said.
But Harkin said he can’t bring about this revolution in health care reform and reimbursement on his own. “I will do everything I can to include integrative medicine in the health care reform bill,” he said. “But I can’t do it alone. I need each and every one of you here to go home and be real health evangelists for health reform.”
Integrative practitioners must take the message of integrative and preventive health to their places of worship, to civic leaders, to their friends and everyone else they know, Harkin said.
“I need you to make appointments with your Congressmen and your Senators, either here in Washington or in your home districts,” he said. “This reform won’t just happen. We have to get people around the country to demand this change. Seize the day” and make it happen he said.
(Follow the links for contact information for all the Senators and Congressmen.)
Harkin is clearly looking for active partners in this health care reform effort. In the middle of the Senate hearing, he had asked Ornish, Weil, Oz and Hyman: “I’m just wondering, how do we harness you all in advising us and advising the President? How can I put you in great positions of power so you can” help make decisions about the needed reforms?
“How can you get us involved?” Ornish responded. “Ask us! We’ve been waiting for this opportunity for a long time!” Ornish added that he had once naively assumed that good research was the key to reforming medicine. But research alone doesn’t cut it, he said. “We need to change the re-imbursement system. We are all here to help you. Just ask!” Responded Harkin, “we just have to figure out how to integrate you into the health care reform debate.”
The next day at the IOM Summit, Harkin took the time to answer questions from the floor, and I asked whether part of the $1.1 billion he appropriated for comparative effectiveness research in the stimulus bill could be used to study the effectiveness of Complementary and Alternative Medicien (CAM) treatments. Harkin had indicated at the Senate hearing that he was “afraid” this money would be used simply to compare one kind of allopathic treatment against another. Apparently, there is nothing in the stimulus package language requiring that CAM treatments be included, but Harkin was receptive to the suggestion.
Harkin didn’t mince words at the Senate hearing in an impromptu assessment of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the NIH, an office that he spearheaded and funded through the Senate Appropriations Committee. “One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches,” he said. “Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it’s fallen short. The focus, quite frankly, has mostly been on disproving rather than seeking out and improving” alternative therapies.
The next day, Harkin told the Summit that he thought the time has come to rename NCCAM: instead of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine it should be called the “National Center for Integrative Medicine,” he said.
Previous to his arrival, there had been much discussion at the Summit about the need to move away from the concept of “integrative medicine” and toward “integrative health care,” a term more inclusive of non-physicians. “Why not call it the National Center for Integrative Health Care?” someone asked Harkin. He seemed to agree, and wrote down the suggestion on his notes at the podium.
“Let’s disentangle from the status quo and get health care reform done right this time,” he said.
The question is whether those who attended the Summit will take the enthusiasm home with them, and take time off from their practices to actually begin lobbying and agitating for change. Those who are profiting from the current broken system -- the AMA, health insurance companies, big Pharma – will be spending hundreds of thousands (and possibly millions) of dollars to make sure their “voice” is heard. Their “First Amendment right,” as the spokesman for the Chamber of Commerce so poetically put it, will be amply represented.
Who will speak for us? Don’t look to the right or the left: there is nobody there! If you want to make sure that integrative health care is really included in this health care reform effort, you’re going to have to put the sweat equity in yourself. If we don’t get ourselves, our clients, our friends and colleagues organized now, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
Write the Integrator Blog and tell John Weeks who you’ve called, and what the response was!
As Hillel once said: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”
Daphne White is a Certified Healing Touch Practitioner with additional training in trauma release work. Daphne also practices a powerful form of trauma release work called Somatic Experiencing.Using one or both of these techniques, Daphne helps clients alleviate chronic pain conditions; reduce anxiety and increase the body's relaxation response; recover from painful childhood accidents; strengthen the body's immune system; prepare or recover from surgery; heal trauma from car accidents, whiplash and falls; and more.
Daphne, thank you for this great post. I was there for part of Harkin's presentation and found him inspiring... though I have to admit, I have an inherent mistrust of politicians :)
Still, his track record seems to speak for itself, and he clearly was passionate about what he was saying. I loved his anecdote about the program of bringing fruits and vegetables into schools that he instituted a few years ago. Didn't he say that what began with a very small amount is now actually a $1 billion program?
The program is simple - bring fresh fruits and vegetables into schools and place them wherever the kids are - in the halls, in the classrooms - so that they don't have to go somewhere else to get them. And imagine this - contrary to what all the doubters predicted, it turned out that when kids have fruit sitting around, they will actually eat it!
This just goes to show how we undermine ourselves in advance by assuming something that's not true - e.g., that kids won't like fruit or that they will create chaos in the hallways by throwing it at each other.
The Coach in me makes me wonder what other assumptions we as a society are operating on that we need to let go of. Our thoughts really do create our reality in a very concrete way, and sometimes the quickest path to change is through changing your own thinking - including by letting go of your assumptions and negative beliefs...
Posted by: Izabella Tabarovsky | March 06, 2009 at 10:14 AM
Izabella and Daphne:
What a great posting this is. Thanks so much for it. Hopefully, those of us who are committed to seeing that inexpensive, non-toxic ("alternative") treatments become part of our new healthcare plan, will make ourselves heard.
I like the idea of contacting our political representatives. In addition, I have another idea that might help.
It has come to my attention, via an email from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, that the proposed panel empowered by the IOM to make recommendations on the comparative effectiveness of treatments has no members representing the public. It points out that “the only patient or consumer representative named to the panel’s tentative roster was from the Alzheimer’s Association, a single-issue patient advocacy group that receives substantial support from the drug industry.” (To see the names of all 16 members: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/CommitteeView.aspx?key=49051
If you go to the above link, you will also see that there are also NO members who represent the alternative/holistic/complementary/integrative community.
This, of course, is not good news. But, also according to the email, the public has until March 23 to add our own comments on the IOM’s proposed panel! See http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/FeedBack.aspx?key=49051&type=committee.
This IS good news.
I am planning to comment that they need to have representatives from the holistic/alternative/integrative communities, and that unless they do, our healthcare system will certainly go broke!
I recently conducted an interview with Dr. Burt Berkson (MD, PhD) for my website, HonestMedicine.com. For over 30 years, Dr. Berkson has successfully treated patients with non-toxic, inexpensive (non-Big-Pharma) treatments, such as intravenous alpha lipoic acid (ALA) and low dose naltrexone (LDN). His results have been exceptional, including several cases of remissions in patients with pancreatic cancer.
I know that you will not be shocked (but many of your site visitors might be) to learn that, although in the 1970s, the NIH was very supportive of Dr. Berkson’s work with alpha lipoic acid, in the end, the interest in his work with these kinds of non-pharmaceutically based treatments waned. In my interview with him, Dr. Berkson expressed a strong belief that this eventual lack of interest stemmed from the fact that no one (read “Big Pharma”) would make “big bucks” on these inexpensive treatments, and therefore, no costly trials were ever funded.
Please listen to this important interview with Dr. Berkson at http://tinyurl.com/cgfjh3 . You will also find a transcript of the entire interview there -- complete with links to several of his published papers.
It is time that voices like Dr. Berkson's are also heard in the major healthcare arena.
Thanks for this posting. And I hope we can all work together to effect this very important change. (Feel free to contact me.)
Many thanks,
Julia Schopick
www.HonestMedicine.com
Posted by: Julia Schopick | March 10, 2009 at 06:11 PM
Julia, thank you for this. This is so important, I'm thinking of emailing all of my people to tell them go look at the links you provide and take an active stance... Thank you for the work you're doing!
Posted by: Izabella Tabarovsky | March 10, 2009 at 06:37 PM
The senate hearing was excellent. I have been an advocate of orthomolecular (nutritional) medicine for nearly 15 years. I've attended many Nutritional Medicine Today conferences hosted by Dr. Abram Hoffer's group in Canada, the International Society of Orthomolecular Medicine. Dr. Hyman's talk on "functional medicine" was very similar. Dr. Ornish was also very good. All had something important to contribute. We all know that the current medical model is not working for most people with chronic illnesses. Prevention and healing through nutritional medicine works for many, many people. It has changed my life.
Insurance companies have done much harm to the medical system. I would like to see us do away with our current system. But if we don't and we are forced to have coverage, then at the very least we deserve to have options for health care choices. Please support this Integrative Care model.
Posted by: J.L. Fearing | October 29, 2009 at 04:37 AM