A pulled muscle courtesy of helping a neighbor move some concrete slabs “cemented” my interest in what has commonly come to be called, among other things, “Integrative Medicine.”

I’ll spare you the painful details. Suffice to say that what was supposed to be a couple of hours helping a friend repair a walkway led me to the hospital where x-rays convinced the physician that I could spend the night in traction or go home with a bottle of muscle relaxants. The pills did help to relax my muscles. But they did nothing for the pinched nerve in my back that caused my excruciating pain.

At work the next day as a junior high school band director, I walked around like a man with a heated knife plunged in his back. After a few days of obvious agony, a friend coaxed me into his car and drove me to a stately home where we were greeted by a man in a white coat. He led me to a room where he took my blood pressure, asked a few questions and instructed me to lie back on an exam table. Then he lightly pulled on my ankle. I felt something move in my back and, when I sat up, the pain, somewhat miraculously, was gone.

I wish I could tell you that I shouted “Woo Woo!” But I didn’t. (I’ll explain in a moment.)

When I asked the gentleman why the doctors at the hospital hadn’t simply performed this procedure, he explained, “I’m a doctor of osteopathic medicine. Today, in 1977, they still won’t allow me to practice in their facility.” (Simply put, those trained in osteopathic medicine also study physical manipulation of the body’s muscle tissue and bones.)

Flash forward 20 years, after I traveled a circuitous route from directing teenage musicians to running a small hospital in Windber, PA. There I adopted a mantra that said, “I don’t care what it is that makes a patient feel better, just as long as it does.”

Thus, during my tenure, I introduced what at the time seemed radical to some in my little rural community, such pet, massage, music and aroma therapies. Then I hired a former chiropractor turned MD and a DO, sent them for acupuncture training and opened the doors to reiki, yoga, roving psychologists, music throughout the hospital and much, much more.

My guiding principal was that I just wanted people to get better while following the popular health care dictum to “first, do no harm.” If it didn’t hurt, why not let people choose to try other non-invasive treatments to compliment (and not replace) those prescribed by their physician?

Sounds sensible, right? In fact, the way some in the local medical community reacted, you would have thought we were in league with the devil! While some simply patronized our efforts, dismissing these alternative disciplines as “Woo Woo” medicine, others were a bit more combative, accusing these efforts as someone undermining “real” medicine. Many of those attitudes exist even today.

Regarding either camp, I would direct them to the thousands of scientific papers providing evidence-based proof that many on these disciplines are effective. That they are not more widely understood, promoted or accepted is a mix of misinformation, ego and politics that I’ll not get into here.
Did it work at our facility? All I can share is that of our 13 peer hospitals, we had the lowest restraint levels, lowest lengths of stay, lowest readmission rates and—at a whopping one percent!—the lowest infection rate. Also, even with a hospice, we had the lowest death rates among our peers.

Let its detractors call it “Woo Woo” medicine. I prefer to call it patient-centered care. Maybe if more folks—including members of the medical community—studied what hundreds of integrative medical centers are doing across the world and the positive results they are seeing, they’d embrace, rather than dismiss out of hand, these disciplines to improve prevention and treatment efforts.

I never have, and likely never will, set this up as an “either-or” choice by saying healthcare providers or patients should choose integrative medicine disciplines instead of more traditional treatments. Neither area can promise 100 percent success.

But more and more evidence is confirming that when integrative medicine disciplines are offered in conjunction with traditional treatments, more people benefit. And where’s the harm in that?