By Simon J. Evans, PhD

This post will be a little different format than our usual ones. On February 25th, in Washington DC, the Institute of Medicine hosted a special summit on Integrative Health. There were some incredible talks and they’re all freely available at http://www.imsummitwebcast.org. The focus was how we can stop so many people from getting sick, instead of just trying to treat people once they get there.

Dr. Dean Ornish gave a great talk that I strongly encourage you to check out – even though it’s 45 minutes long. If you have any interest in getting more of a prevention focus into the broken health care system, you’ll enjoy his talk. Once at the webcast site, click the sessions tab and choose the session called ‘Science’. Dean’s talk is the keynote on that page. Here are some bullet points from his presentation:

• Integrative medicine should bring together lifestyle, stress management and emotional well being into therapeutic strategies.
• We can no longer simply study things in isolation. Here’s an example. Curcumin may help prevent Alzheimer’s and has data to support that, but other studies show it doesn’t do anything. However, when given with black pepper the bioavailability increases 2000%. The way we currently design studies by isolating compounds, misses these interactions.
• “Sometimes it’s more important to know what patient has a disease than what disease the patient has.”
• Social support and stress management play large roles in disease susceptibility and recovery and should be part of a treatment approach.
• “We spend so much time in medicine mopping up the floor from the sink that’s over flowing, instead of just turning off the faucet.”
• The body has a remarkable ability to heal itself if given the tools it needs. Sometimes the low-tech approaches are the most powerful.
• Changing your environment can change your genes. If you have ‘bad’ genes, you just need to make bigger changes. Genes are our predispositions, not our fate.
• Heart and blood vessel diseases kill more people than any other diseases, yet they are almost completely preventable and reversible.

Many of these points, we have spent entire blog posts on in the past, so you may have seen them before. Still I hope you can find the time to check out a couple of the videos at http://www.imsummitwebcast.org. Start with Dean’s.

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