Wellness for Health-Conscious Consumers,
Patients, and Professionals . . .
(CLICK TO ACCESS PORTAL FOR RESOURCES/TIPS FOR LIFE)
As a savvy, proactive consumer . . .
Do you need help tapping into wellness and navigating our nation’s massive and complex healthcare information maze?
As a patient, are you perplexed and frustrated by the lack of collaborative care you want toward achieving the highest level of wellness possible? Would you like to design your own patient-centered wellness team no matter where you live?
As a dedicated healthcare professional . . .
- Have you just started a new practice and need more patients?
- Or are you ready to make some changes to your existing practice?
- Do you wish your patients were more compliant and more actively engaged in their own health and wellness?
- Do you want to attract loyal, long-term patients committed to wellness and lasting lifestyle behavioral changes?
- Are you challenged by the marketing side of the business, as you try to preserve compassionate care for your patients?
Answers to these and many more questions are within reach right now! Want to learn more about how these three worlds of wellness have joined together? Contact Sharon to share her own wellness journey and help you find a variety of top resources to reach your highest wellness potential as a patient and healthcare professional.
Consider these three definitions of healthcare in our country today . . .
Conventional Healthcare
A system in which medical doctors and other healthcare professionals (such as nurses, pharmacists, and therapists) treat symptoms and diseases using drugs, radiation, or surgery. Also called allopathic medicine, biomedicine, mainstream medicine, orthodox medicine, and Western medicine. National Cancer Institute (www.cancer.gov)
Complementary & Alternative Healthcare
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is the popular term for health and wellness therapies that have typically not been part of conventional Western medicine. Complementary means treatments that are used along with conventional medicine. Alternative means treatments used in place of conventional medicine. CAM focuses on the whole person and includes physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health. Mayo Clinic (www.mayoclinic.org)
Integrative Healthcare
Integrative medicine is grounded in the definition of health. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Integrative medicine seeks to restore and maintain health and wellness across a person’s lifespan by understanding the patient’s unique set of circumstances and addressing the full range of physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual and environmental influences that affect health.
Through personalizing care, integrative medicine goes beyond the treatment of symptoms to address all the causes of an illness. In doing so, the patient’s immediate health needs as well as the effects of the long-term and complex interplay between biological, behavioral, psychosocial and environmental influences are taken into account.
Integrative medicine is not the same as alternative medicine, which refers to an approach to healing that is utilized in place of conventional therapies, or complementary medicine, which refers to healing modalities that are used to complement allopathic approaches. If the defining principles are applied, care can be integrative regardless of which modalities are utilized. Duke Integrative Medicine (www.dukeintegrativemedicine.org)