Integrative medicine - what’s it all about?

Robin Daly, founder of Yes to Life and contributor to The Cancer Revolution believes that the latest trend in healthcare deserves a better rep.

‘Integrative’ is a new buzzword that you’re likely to stumble across quite regularly these days, if you’re in the habit of following health issues in the media. But what does it really mean? Is it really, as some detractors would suggest, just a rebrand of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in an attempt to make it more ‘respectable’?

Well the answer is a resounding ‘no’. Integrative Medicine (IM) does indeed include CAM but it also includes everything that conventional medicine has to offer. As such, it represents a significant new step, a step that very many practitioners of both conventional and CAM approaches have deep reservations about. Nonetheless, it opens up many new possibilities and, importantly, reflects a new attitude towards medicine itself.

Up until now, whether a practitioner was conventional or alternative bore more relationship to religious zealotry than to anything scientific. Furthermore, respect for the personal choices of the patient was a low to zero priority. There has been out-and-out war across the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two approaches for decades, if not centuries, with both sides maintaining that the other will surely kill you. This is a terrible situation for the most important person in the picture - the person who is ill. He or she is encouraged through threats, fear-mongering, propaganda and all the usual methods employed by zealots of all types, to become a fully signed-up member of one ‘faith’ or the other, even though they may have a far less partisan view themselves. Friends, relatives and carers are prey to the same forces and line up on one side or the other, applying further pressure to the patient to become a true believer. People questioning whether or not to have chemotherapy, for example, can simultaneously come under intense pressure both from oncologists who are simply looking to implement what they are taught as ‘best practice’, and from alternative practitioners who are ‘certain’ that it could never, ever be part of a solution.

This is a tragic state of affairs that continues to this day. Clearly both sides have much to offer as both approaches produce ‘survivors’. At their time of greatest need, people have been sold very short by this simplistic either/or status quo. But now, thankfully, a new model is emerging, one that lines up perfectly with the patient’s most fundamental question regarding any treatment: will it help me? A patient has enough problems navigating through cancer and cancer treatment without finding themselves dropped into a war zone in which winning and being right can be appear to be higher priorities than their wellbeing. What they need are not diehards who will never look beyond their fervent credos, but trustworthy allies who they can depend on for the most objective and impartial advice.

So IM is a step beyond the outdated conflict, in which all potentially helpful strategies can be evaluated for suitability in any individual case, and which opens up exciting new possibilities of what can be achieved by combining approaches in novel ways. While still in its infancy, some of the best exponents of IM are using conventional approaches such as chemotherapy or radiation in ways that can achieve the same result while minimising or eliminating many of the terrible side effects or collateral damage that are normally part and parcel of treatment. Low-dose chemotherapy for example - as it says on the tin - combines a far lower, and therefore far less toxic dose, with treatments such as hyperthermia to increase its effect, high doses of vitamins and other natural supplements to improve resilience and combat side effects, and natural immune boosters to avoid the terrible immune-suppressing effect of the drugs. This is science - not dogma - and it’s science at its best.

IM opens up a world of choice for people. Given the freedom to explore all options, outside of any agenda to conform to the practitioner’s belief system, there is space for their priorities and preferences to be both heard and accommodated. There is only one common agenda in play: the best possible outcome for them, the person who desperately needs help to recover their health. This is a truly trustworthy basis for forming the most productive type of patient-practitioner partnership.

I hope this explains why Yes to Life enthusiastically supports IM, and fully respects patient choice. We see IM as the future of cancer care. And although the UK is tragically backward in embracing this desperately needed evolution in medicine, other countries are showing us the way and simultaneously reaping the benefits.