The U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other country, yet, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, average life expectancy is three to five years shorter than similarly developed countries and about 20% higher in preventable deaths each year. How did we get here, and what can be done to reverse this unhealthy inversion?
One hopeful trend is growing awareness among practitioners and patients alike that the American tradition of treating mental and physical health as separate disciplines is outmoded, and health care providers are increasingly pairing psychological services within hospitals and clinics that treat physical illnesses.
As part of this rethinking of health care and treatment, there is a movement to blend this holistic approach with complementary alternative medicine (CAM), which includes techniques such as acupuncture, hypnosis, yoga, and herbal medicines, also referred to as ‘whole health’. As Saybrook University President Nathan Long, Ed.D., explains, “What integrative health attempts to do is to take the best parts of Western medicine, especially Western therapeutic interventions, and merge them with complementary and alternative models of care so that those are coming together to provide the greatest amount of support to individuals.” This support will improve overall healthcare outcomes through multi-modal, person-centered care — a win-win for practitioners and patients.
While some may intuitively understand the link between mental and physical health, recognizing how to apply that awareness to improve patient outcomes across the U.S. population is an enormous challenge. It requires not only rethinking how medicine is practiced today but also reimagining what the future of health care will look like. Dr. Long and his leadership team are leading an effort to promote an approach called integrative health for all. Their goal is to help the public understand the value of these new approaches and the availability of a broader range of services, as well as to address the greater challenge of standing up a network across the country to provide those services.
Dr. Long foresees an effort comprising three complementary steps.
- The first step is to call attention to the need for greater healthcare access, including mental health and mind-body wellness, across the U.S.
- The second step is to spotlight those hospitals and clinics that are engaging in best practices when it comes to innovation in integrative health.
- The third step is to build partnerships among organizations to serve a broader network of integrative health providers.
“The goal of integrative health is looking at the person holistically,” Dr. Long says, offering the case of a theoretical patient who suffers from depression, is a cigarette smoker, a heavy drinker, and suffers from a range of physical ailments that are attendant with that lifestyle. After screening this individual, an integrative care team would develop a course of care. For example, if the person is on antidepressants, the team might augment care through hypnosis, mindfulness, meditation, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Once a plan is developed, the team would go to the patient and say, “You’ve given us your challenges, you’ve identified some long-term goals, and here are options for us to partner together to help you achieve these goals.”
A cornerstone of any successful patient care program is access, which these days means blending telehealth with in-person visits. “An integrative care team works with each person individually, which is very humanistic, and they also look at how we help the patient achieve their maximal goals over a given number of months,” Dr. Long says. “That’s the ideal. If I were to say kind of the gold standard, that would be what it could look like.” Dr. Long points to the Camden Center in Los Angeles as a model for how comprehensive health care might work broadly across the country. Its interdisciplinary care team clinic provides mental health care, medical care, and holistic health care all under one roof to patients who seek it. Nevertheless, the challenge comes down to access and affordability of services, addressing these will also be paramount.
Laying the groundwork for a new understanding of care
Creating care networks that can treat a large segment of the population will require innovation beyond the options currently available. Such an initiative will include improving connectivity among care providers. One possible approach that is gaining traction is using blockchain technology to allow information and file sharing among providers that is secure, decentralized, and efficient.
Another necessity is reforming medical and mental health education to prepare the next generation of clinicians for a new integrative reality. Dr. Long points to future psychiatrists in medical school and future counselors in clinical training programs as being an important audience to become future advocates for this new approach to health care. “We need to create new curriculum models that can support training and education in this space that show for instance that a lot of the complementary forms of care can be very effective when applied to Western techniques,” he says.
Additionally, professional societies such as the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association ought to embrace an integrative model and to collaborate on advancing an understanding of this approach to client-centered care.
Perhaps most important will be educating the public about the increasing range of tools available to them. For example, patients living in areas with limited access to mental health services need information about the telehealth options available to them and how to determine which will best meet their needs. The goal is to bring these services under one umbrella so potential clients can educate themselves and gain early access to the help they need.
“We have a student who’s in rural New York,” says Dr. Long. “There’s one psychologist in her rural county serving close to 15,000 people. There’s way more need than there are therapists. The goal is figuring out how to fill those gaps to support the overall health and well-being of these vital communities.”
What Saybrook brings to the movement
As a leader in health sciences education, Saybrook University is uniquely positioned to be at the forefront of creating integrative health awareness. The institution is developing a growing selection of graduate programs geared toward helping practitioners of traditional medicine using traditional techniques to combine integrative skills with their expertise and expand their range of care.
In addition, Saybrook boasts some of the leaders in integrative health, including Donald Moss, Ph.D., the dean of the College of Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences (CIMHS); Eric Wilmarth, Ph.D., dean of the Psychophysiology Department; Julie Cerrato, Ph.D., faculty in the Mind-Body Wellness Department, who is a significant presence in the wellness coaching field; and Jessica Weissman, Ph.D., who is chair of CIMHS up our Integrative and Functional Nutrition program, and is well known in that field, as is Maureen Molinari, Ph.D., specialization coordinator in Integrative and Functional Nutrition.
Collaboration is key to the future of health care
The pressures on the mental health profession have created an urgent need for a new approach to mental health care. “We need to invest at the federal, state, and local level in preventive wellness care, including into mental health,” Dr. Long says. “Preventive care also reduces the cost and the impact in the future. We need to make those investments now so that we see long-term rewards.” Most of all, Dr. Long emphasizes the critical importance of collaboration among all corners of medicine and wellness. He says, “Collaboration is central to our vision of the future to get people the care they need when they need it.”
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