Advancing Integrative Medical Care as the Gold Standard

man with guitar playing for a person in a hospital bed

Integrative medicine, which blends conventional medicine with complementary therapies, such as acupuncture and therapeutic music, has been shown to improve patients’ well-being and help them manage pain, allowing some to take less medication.

Many patients, including those recovering from severe trauma and surgery, don’t have access to integrative care because few hospitals offer it. The Institute for Integrative Health is working to change that.

Innovative Model

Through a partnership with the University of Maryland Medical System and the Center for Integrative Medicine, the Institute is supporting a unique integrative care program at R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center and the University of Maryland Rehabilitation and Orthopedic Institute. Encompassing every stage of a patient’s experience—from critical care through rehabilitation—the Integrative Patient Care Project has strong potential to serve as a model for programs at other health care institutions.

In tandem with conventional treatment, the Integrative Patient Care Project offers complementary therapies, such as massage, acupuncture, relaxation techniques like guided imagery, and Reiki, a form of energy medicine whose goal is to activate a healing response. The program is designed to demonstrate the practical viability of inpatient integrative care, improve patient–reported outcomes, and provide cost effectiveness guidelines.

Prestigious Lecture

Evidence of the growing interest in this approach was the invitation for Brian Berman, MD, president of the Institute for Integrative Health and director of the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine, to present the recent Mancuso Family Lecture in Humanism, part of the University of Maryland School of Medicine Surgery Ground Rounds Series.

In his lecture, “The Golden Moment: What it is and Why it Matters,” Dr. Berman explained the Center for Integrative Medicine’s approach to pain management. He highlighted two critically ill Shock Trauma patients who were helped immensely through complementary therapies along with conventional medicine.

International Forum

Further exploring the value of an integrative approach, the Institute co-sponsored a conference last month at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) on integrative models of care for patients suffering from cancer, gastrointestinal disorders, and trauma.

Leaders of the world’s top six integrative medicine programs, including the Institute-supported program at R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, convened after the conference to explore best practices and develop recommendations for improving patient care. Guidelines on structure, integration, financial models, and clinical management will be published in peer-reviewed medical literature.

These are examples of how the Institute is fostering bold ideas that can transform health care.

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is debate about whether or not one actually needs to experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.