Peaceful, Easy Healing

More and more patients are rejecting harsh and invasive conventional treatments in favor of alternative therapies. In response, several prominent health institutions are embracing holistic healing.

By Stacie Stukin

Joanne Perron, M.D., spent five years practicing medicine in a busy OB/GYN office, where the patients trundled through as if on an assembly line—in and out in 10 minutes. "I was frazzled," she recalls by phone from her home in Monterey, California. "By the end of the day, I felt disconnected and stressed. Eventually, I got very frustrated and disillusioned and began to ask myself, 'Is that all there is?'"

Perron had to face the fact that she wasn't the healer she had set out to become. "Conventional medicine is like a religion," she says. "You get indoctrinated at an early age, and then sometimes you start to question your belief system. You start to ask, 'Why?'—or, more important, 'Why not?'"

The questioning began as she realized that the things conventional medicine had taught her didn't often cure her patients. And some of those patients came back to tell her they'd gotten better after trying alternative therapies—for example, botanical remedies for menopausal symptoms, Chinese herbs for uterine bleeding, or acupuncture for pain. In Georgia, where she was then practicing medicine, prayer is commonly employed to help healing as well. "I felt there was a gap in my knowledge. My patients were pursuing things I knew nothing about," she says. "I had learned all that I could, but I knew I needed to learn more." Perron cut back her hours at work and started taking yoga classes; in time, she enrolled in a 200-hour yoga teacher certification program.

Perron's patients are part of the growing group of Americans turning toward complementary and alternative medicine to cure their ills and improve their quality of life. A national survey released last May by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the National Center for Health Statistics found that 36 percent of U.S. adults use complementary and alternative medicine. That number jumps to 62 percent when prayer used specifically for health reasons is included in the definition. The reasons for alternative medicine's popularity go beyond the practical, according to a 1998 Journal of the American Medical Association article authored by John A. Astin, Ph.D., titled "Why Patients Use Alternative Medicine." Astin wrote that people seeking alternative medicine aren't necessarily dissatisfied with conventional medicine, but they find "these health care alternatives to be more congruent with their own values, beliefs, and philosophical orientations toward health and life." It's true; there has been a significant evolution in our time toward a more proactive, holistic view of well-being.

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Conventional medicine has a lopsided view of the physical, mental, and spiritual body," surmises Andrew Weil, M.D. By now a cultural icon with his friendly smile and oversize gray beard, Weil has long been willing to take on the medical mainstream and advocate what he calls integrative medicine. His definition of the term is very straightforward: healing-oriented medicine that takes into account the whole person (body, mind, and spirit), including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic partnership between consumer and healer and makes use of all appropriate therapies, both conventional and alternative.

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