Gracey Holistic Health

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Make your health care work for you

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Think of all of the people who help improve and maintain your health. You may have a primary care physician. But you could also have a nutritionist. And a psychiatrist or psychotherapist. And a personal trainer. And another specialist, perhaps. Each professional in your health care network has a particular background, set of skills, and expertise. When combined together, you receive the best of all worlds.

Holistic medicine isn’t trying to replace your doctor or your routine. It can be integrated into your existing health care routine for a variety of conditions.

For example, your doctor may prescribe medication to reduce the frequency of migraines, while your acupuncturist can help reduce the pain or stop a migraine dead in its tracks. Or your surgeon might fix a broken bone, while your physical therapist helps with mobility and your acupuncturist helps with post-surgery pain and recovery.

Start with the whole picture of your health

It’s important to understand all aspects of a patient’s healthcare network. That’s why when I see a patient for the first time, I make a point to learn their history, including treatments currently being received or prior treatments, medications being taken, and health goals that a patient is working towards.

With that information, I can better understand which services will serve you best. In so doing, I’ll focus on how to build the existing work you’ve received, offer new perspectives to treatment and collaborate, as needed, with your other health care practitioners.

Talk about your treatment plan

Everyone in your healthcare network is working for you. That’s why communicating about the treatments that you are receiving is important. But communication or collaboration can be difficult when not everyone is speaking the same language.

If you are trying to talk with your doctor about acupuncture, you might need to phrase the treatment in Western medical terms. But this can be hard to explain.

That’s why I’m happy to talk with your doctor personally to explain what the treatment is from a biomedical point of view. Because the more that everybody knows, the more that everybody can help you. That’s why integrated, holistic health care can work so well—it’s a patient-centered team approach.

Holistic medicine: Treatment for all of you

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Picture this: you blow a tire on your car and have to take it into the shop. The mechanic replaces your tire. Two days later, your car breaks down because the mechanic didn’t inspect it for other possible issues.

Frustrating, right? Unfortunately, some doctors, because of their specialized focus, miss how all systems are doing. This means that their patient’s overall health may go unchecked—like the mechanic in the story above.

A great mechanic would fix the immediate problem, conduct a brief inspection of the car’s health, and (as needed) fix it or offer suggestions for proper care while it’s in the shop.

In short, that’s what holistic medicine can do for your health!

What does holistic medicine mean?

The American Holistic Health Association defines holistic medicine as “the art and science of healing that addresses the whole person – body, mind, and spirit.”

Healing the body

My practice offers acupuncture and other complementary treatments to heal the body. These therapies are becoming more common, with some 2016 Summer Olympics athletes like Michael Phelps seeking these treatment options.

Healing the mind and spirit

While western medicine has advanced treatments for healing the body, it only takes one grueling 5-hour trip to the emergency room to understand that the spirit can oftentimes be threatened as the body is being healed.

It makes sense, then, that healing the mind and spirit starts with a meaningful patient-practitioner relationship. This relationship is fundamental in Eastern medicine practices and has been shown to have real, measurable results.

In a paper titled “Relieving Pain in America“ published by the Institute of Medicine:

“One factor in the success of a placebo—or any pain treatment, for that matter— is the prescriber’s empathy or skill in communicating with the patient. Evidence suggests that for patients treated with placebo pills, a positive relationship with a practitioner improves outcomes (Kaptchuk et al., 2008) and, in a sense, engages the brain to help in pain control by instilling optimism and confidence. Because placebo use could undermine trust, Kaptchuk and colleagues (2010) told patients they were receiving a placebo, and the treatment still produced statistically significant improvements in terms of mean global improvement scores, reduced symptom severity, and adequate relief at both an 11-day midpoint and 21-day endpoint (Kaptchuk et al., 2010).”

But what do mind and spirit treatment options look like?

In my practice, I provide lifestyle coaching for that purpose. Diet, exercise, and mindfulness are important facets of how you live your life. These lifestyle factors are linked with your health holistically, and improving even one can put you back on the right road towards better health.

Gracey Holistic Health

My practice focuses on addressing these three key aspects of health, and I employ multiple approaches to help my patients holistically. Periodic tune-ups offer an opportunity to check-in with yourself to insure that your systems are running well. As my patients know, that’s why I offer seasonal tune-ups.

So, if you prefer optimal performance then you need to keep yourself well-tuned. On that note, if you think it’s time for a full-body tune-up, I’m your mechanic.

The science behind acupuncture

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Did you know that acupuncture is at least 2,500 years old? This form of  complementary medicine has been used as a method for treating mind and body ailments since well before any modern medicine—like penicillin—was discovered.

While the scientific medical community has a ways to go with researching and understanding how eastern medicine translates into western modes of medicine, the underlying principles for understanding and treating the human body has remained largely the same.

Western and Eastern medicine: Effective in different ways

In simplest terms, your doctor’s job is to maintain and restore your health by helping to prevent and treat any illness. If you went to the doctor feeling sick, you probably went through a battery of tests, like getting your blood pressure taken or having your chest listened to with a stethoscope. The doctor does this to learn how your body’s working and provide a diagnosis. One symptom can hint at signs of a larger problem.

The same is true in acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). When I first meet a patient, I’ll listen for pulse and test other measures to see if the body is functioning properly. The mind can also have very powerful effects on the body (see how gratitude can affect health). That’s why I also ask a series of intake questions to better understand the root cause of the problem.

While western medical practitioners may give you a pill that interacts with your body to create different chemical reactions, eastern medical practitioners use points on the skin to stimulate different reactions throughout the body.  

But while both of these forms of medicine look at the body as a system and try to understand where the system goes wrong (and treat the underlying problem in different ways), there has been far more structured research around what makes western medicine “work.”

Studies show…

Even though TCM is far older than what we understand as “medicine” today, the practice still has a way to go in terms of being methodically documented and analyzed through well designed research.

Acupuncture skeptics point to evidence from literature reviews that factors like expectation and belief may play important roles in the beneficial effects of acupuncture on pain. Ted Kaptchuk, Professor of Medicine and Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has been a leading figure in placebo studies, with a background himself in East Asian studies and Chinese Medicine.

So if belief and expectation are important parts of the body as a system, does that make the treatment any less valid (or helpful)?

In a 2015 study, researchers found that acupuncture improved symptoms for patients in palliative care. According to the paper, “acupuncture effectively reduced symptoms of pain, tiredness, nausea, depression, anxiety, and shortness of breath, and enhanced feelings of well-being.”

In another study from March 2016, researchers found that consistent acupuncture treatments appeared to offer significant relief of physical disability and pain for veterans with Gulf War Illness.

So what’s happening?

In short, we don’t totally know yet.

A 2010 scientific review in Neuromodulation concluded that acupuncture stimulates the nerves of the skin and muscles, “modulating the imbalance” between different parts of the nervous system.

Another scientific review from Anesthesia and Analgesia showed that acupuncture is linked to higher levels of some types of endorphins (the “feel good” chemical produced by the nervous system) at the same time that patients reported decreases in their pain levels.

Prove it to yourself

If you have never tried acupuncture before, and are uncertain how it might work for you, let me show you! In addition to traditional (insertive) acupuncture, I practice a gentle, non-insertive style of acupuncture that does not break the skin. A recent study shows that it’s gentle enough to use on newborns.

Along the way, I will help you try to understand as best I can. But just because we may not fully understand the physiological mechanisms that underlie acupuncture, doesn’t mean that it can’t be a valuable treatment option for you.