A comment on the current trends in complementary, alternative, or integrative medicine, which looks beyond surgery and drugs to heal illness and promote health. Complementary therapy is gaining popularity throughout the U.S. to the tune of billions of dollars annually. The popularity of alternative therapies has resulted in many hospitals and medical centers including Harvard in Boston and Columbia in New York to offer healing touch, massage, acupuncture, and hypnosis as a part of their holistic approach to health care. Not as stand along therapies, but in combination with surgery, pain management, obstetrics, and in areas of health promotion such as smoking cessation, weight and stress management in a multidisciplinary approach?
An independent panel convened by the National Institutes of Health encouraged wider acceptance of behavioral and relaxation therapies for treating chronic pain. Siegel and Cheek reported for years that hypnosis, relaxation, guided imagery, and cognitive therapy offer a significant intervention in terms of easing the anxiety, pain, and discomfort that comes with surgery, childbirth and some of the related chronic pain syndromes.
Major surgery is probably the single most stressful medical experience that people voluntarily agree to undergo. The patient’s expectations are freedom from pain, awareness, and nausea and vomiting during and after surgery or childbirth. Research has shown the Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) especially hypnosis and imagery can greatly decrease a patients pain, nausea, vomiting and promote faster healing. Health Care Providers can greatly enhance a patient’s comfort and satisfaction in all aspects of health care by incorporating CAM adjuncts to patients in surgery, in the emergency room, pediatrics, obstetrics, and other patient areas. However, CAM is not just for hospital patients but for any doctors office or a place were patients are receiving a procedure.
Patients are asking for complementary therapy. Unfortunately most health insurances do not cover CAM. Also, most physicians are focused on so called scientific medicine not Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Even though, Florence Nightingale wrote her book Notes on Nursing in 1859 explaining the value of an holistic approach to nursing and medicine very little has changed since that time relative to the other advances in medicine.
Michael R. Eslinger, CAPT USN Retired
CRNA, MA, APN, BCH