Towards Integrative Health

Monday, August 27, 2007

Towards Integrative Health (Robert Duggan, M.A., M.Ac.) -- he Horizon Foundation focuses on promoting community wellness. However, "wellness" is a tricky concept in our modern world. For most of us, wellness is the prevention of disease, based on our disease-focused conversations within our healthcare system. We need a different view.

On an individual level, real wellness is about paying attention to our bodies and the messages they give us. Our bodies provide us with internal guides about how to eat, sleep, rest, and breathe — if we are willing to pay attention. Learning to pay attention to our bodies is the first step toward a wellness system radically distinct from a disease-care system.

On the organizational level, an employer promoting wellness gives people the time and space to be in touch with their bodies and the time to take care of themselves. This spring, the Horizon Foundation held a Wellness luncheon with invitees from major businesses in Howard County. For most businesses, healthcare costs are out of control and are increasing at a much faster rate than inflation.

The luncheon speaker, a New York physician, pointed out that all the major diseases driving healthcare costs — heart disease, diabetes, etc. — are, at root, inflammatory diseases. She told the assembled executives, "Your workplaces are inflamed. There isn’t enough time. People are overworked. People don’t take their vacation. People don’t get a chance to stop for lunch. In an inflamed workplace with a lot of stress, there will be a lot of inflammatory disease. In the long run, it is much cheaper to deal with this situation by reducing the intensity, the inflammation, the stress in the workplace than it is to deal with it when the employee has become sick and is hospitalized."

Along these lines, below are suggestions I recently presented to the Health Commissioner of Howard County and to the board of the Horizon Foundation. These recommendations could be adopted by the county (which pays for the healthcare of thousands of employees) or by any corporation. And every family can adopt these suggestions. They were originally offered to me by a patient at Tai Sophia, who was a senior executive of a Fortune 500 company.

Wellness Benefits / Employer Cost Savings

Suggestions for a Wellness Program

Health promotion programs usually include certain basics: preventive testing and/or activities with long-term payoff, such as regular exercise and non-smoking. Here, I point to additional activities that give individuals a real-time, same-day, positive sense of reward and satisfaction. It is well documented that repetition of such activities impacts our neuropeptide receptors for positive feelings. As a beginning, a wellness program should include the following:

1. Provide coupons (e.g., $300 value) to persons with a serious illness (e.g., cancer) for an immediate wellness consultation with an acupuncturist, herbalist or naturopath. These practitioners will educate individuals about how to maximize their own internal wellness and their immune system’s response to the disease.

2. Identify employees who suddenly have become frequent users of healthcare (e.g., their annual healthcare spending has risen abruptly from $100 to $1000) and immediately give them the same set of coupons. Our data indicate that when these persons are able to view their situations from a different perspective, at least 50 percent return quickly to the normal expense level.

3. Give incentives to employees to practice yoga or tai chi, which provide a wide spectrum of benefits beyond that of aerobic exercise, including improved balance and strength, increased flexibility, and those associated with deep breathing and meditation, including reduced stress.

4. Coach employees in the language of wellness/stress reduction/conflict management. In Tai Sophia’s signature Redefining Health workshop, we provide participants with at least 20 linguistic skills — practices that transform relationships in every area of their lives. They reframe how they relate to circumstances through learnings such as “upset is optional” and by learning to view symptoms as teachers. For example, they realize that they aren’t getting enough sleep, or that they need to resolve a conflict. (Several hospitals have integrated many of these Redefining Health practices into their HR programs.)

5. Provide courses in herbs and “food 101,” courses where people learn ways to maintain their own health and wellness. For real-time stress reduction, offer classes in breathing, movement and bodywork, as well as access to seated massage.

6. Provide access to books and videos that promote wellness. Examples include videos about tai chi and yoga, and books such as Andrew Weil’s Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, Mehmat Oz’s YOU: The Owner’s Manual, and my own little book, Common Sense for the Healing Arts. A company could generate such information and make it available through its employee website.

For more information, visit our Web site at www.tai.edu. Called a “national treasure” by Senator Mikulski, Tai Sophia Institute is located in Howard County and is a major anchoring academic institution for this rapidly growing wellness system.