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【medical-news】Holistic medicine is “human” medicine
Despite ever increasing medical technology, every year about 40% more patients in the West are seeking complementary or alternative medicine (CAM).4 In America in 2003, almost 1 in 5 adults reported using one or more mind-body therapies.8 Why is this? I informally interviewed several patients about their experience with doctors and found recurrent views. For example, a 40 year old woman who had a prolapsed intervertebral disc in November 2005 has had several operations and been prescribed a multitude of drugs for pain relief, for problems sleeping, and even for constipation resulting from all the other medications. When I asked her what she thought about her doctors she responded,“I feel as though the doctors are only interested in operating on my back and getting me out of hospital as quickly as possible. They ignore me as a person.”
She has been unable to work for almost two years and currently has depression caused, she feels, by a lack of quality of life. Although she respects that “the doctors know best,” she believes her feelings and factors affecting her quality of life are unimportant to the medical establishment.
It seems that CAM may be driven largely by medicine’s major omission, the failure of holism. Given the insights derived from psychoneuroimmunology, health care must fundamentally be a holistic endeavour. This has helped the biomedical reductionist model of medicine adapt towards a more holistic approach, wherein the use of emotional, psychological, and behavioural interventions have proved useful.10
A holistic approach to medicine is gaining acceptance worldwide, even at the grass roots level. Some medical schools have begun to include lectures on holistic teaching to help the practitioner of tomorrow understand what may be involved and what patients with different beliefs and attitudes might expect in terms of treatment. In a society that is becoming increasingly multicultural and diverse, with different values, beliefs, and perceptions towards medicine, this approach to educate on the basis of holistic medicine is a welcome change.
As future doctors, it is our duty to relieve suffering, even in situations when a cure is not possible or treatment is limited. This can be achieved by using some of the insights derived from psychoneuroimmunology. Each patient is unique and has their own set of cultural beliefs and ideas about his or her situation which must be addressed in the therapeutic effort. It is our responsibility to form partnerships with patients based on trust and to display human values, moving from the old biomedical model to a more “human” model—for what could be more rewarding than practising the art of “human medicine”?
http://student.bmj.com/issues/08/04/life/144.php
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2010-12-07 17:11
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