How doctors are prescribing mind-body therapies
When a person begins to think about forms of medicine, many subjects come to mind. There are conventional, allopathic, alternative, complementary, and integrative therapies and the list can go on. All these divisions have different attitudes of the other, and normally are in two separate areas where they are never talked about with the other. But now the tides are changing, and a recent study shows that one in every 30 Americans was using a mind-body therapy (MBT) because their health-care provider suggested it. This is a big step for integrative therapies, but the only hindrance is that doctors prescribed MBT too late and the full effects cannot be felt.
A group of researchers from the Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School recently studied the amount of people that practice mind-body therapies voluntarily and prescribed. They were intrigued by their findings, and relate the rise in MBT acceptance to the transparency of data findings in clinical trials that support the use of mind-body therapies.
To collect data, researchers surveyed 23,000 U.S. households and found that nearly 6.3 million Americans (about 3 percent of the population) practiced MBT, like yoga, meditation, and touch therapies, because their doctors suggested it. Though this seems like a win for the complementary and alternative medicine side, there is one glitch; the people that were prescribed MBT were actually sicker and used a conventional treatment facility more than a person that voluntarily practiced.
This made researchers and everyone reading scratches their heads. How could an MBT that shows all these positive outcomes, leave somebody still sick? The conclusion made by the researchers was that the clinicians prescribed the MBT too late, sort-of like a last resort options when the conventional therapies failed. This will lead into another thesis, “will the adoption of an MBT early in treatment reduce the treatment time and promote healing”? Some claim that earlier use would help with treatment, and would lead to better outcomes for patients and rely less on the health care system.
Though the effects of mind-body therapies are nothing new for the readers of this blog, it is good to have science promoting their use. The use of complementary and alternative therapies in integrative medical facilities has been widely used, but now maybe a direct plan from the start of treatment will be adopted. Now an easier, less painful, and faster treatment can be implemented for chronic conditions and deathly cancers, like pancreatic cancer or mesothelioma. So far, many people swear by the effects of min0body therapies and other complementary and alternatives medicines.
Allison Brooks
Thank you Allison for sharing your love and knowledge with us. <3 Kimberly
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