Our society has transformed into an increasingly fast-paced world to sustain the productivity and efficiency that we now require. This culture has infiltrated many aspects in our lives – including our visits to the doctor’s office. This affect is felt even more with the increasing demand for doctors and so few of them in the field. Patients get even less time with their physicians, and as a result, never get to the root cause of their pain and are often prescribed unnecessary medications.
On average, we spend 17 minutes with our doctors; which is not enough time to get to a full diagnosis and understand what is happening with the patient. This is where integrated physical medicine comes in.
Integrated physical medicine offers something that is often lacking with conventional medicine – time. This difference allows for doctors to understand what is happening with their patients and get to the underlying cause of their symptoms.
On average, a patient spends one hour with a doctor that practices integrated physical medicine, and a lot of this time is spent talking about symptoms and asking a slew of questions to understand the problem. And understanding the causes of a patient’s conditions, allows them to be addressed directly.
We discussed time spent in these offices, but the question remains:
Does integrated physical medicine work?
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), surveyed 7252 eligible patients who received integrated physical care medicine. This study found that after six months, 31% of patients increased their quality of life as opposed to the 22% who sought conventional care.
This illustrates that people who spent more time with their doctor and worked on treating the root causes, increased their likelihood of a better quality of life.
This is not to say medication is not necessary, there are many cases where medicine is needed in order to handle an illness. Working to fix the root cause of a symptom might help patients reduce the dosage, or even avoid medications that are not necessary altogether.
