As I was preparing for a recent MS Ireland Unspeakable Bits webcast — this one about the uses of medical cannabis for MS — I tucked back into a reference book I’ve been using since the early days of my diagnosis, back in 2001.
The first edition of Allen C. Bowling, MD, PhD’s book Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Multiple Sclerosis was published that same year. I upgraded to the second edition (2007, Demos Medical Publishing) as soon as it came out. It’s been on the multiple sclerosis resource shelf of my study ever since.
It’s a dog-eared old thing by now, but it is ever helpful when someone asks about something they are thinking about trying for MS or its symptoms.
As I continued my research for that webcast, using the search words “complementary and alternative,” I kept coming on another term I hadn’t seen used around the internet before: integrative.
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What Can CAM or Integrative Medicine Do for MS?
Mind you, I mayn’t have been looking for a while, but I don’t know that I’ve seen the term “integrative” used very much when it comes to what is known collectively as Western Medicine.
In fact, when I searched for the term on well-known MS and other health sites, I found very little.
And then I went to search around the National Institute of Health (NIH) website to see what they might have to say on the topic. And didn’t I find not just a description, but also a whole NIH-sponsored center for the study of such things, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.
This one was news to me. They even have a page dedicated to integrative health and multiple sclerosis.
No one is suggesting that CAM or integrative medicine is going to cure MS (well, no one on these sites, nor on this page). But many people with MS will find comfort in the fact that research is being done (albeit slowly) and that, while some things have not been proven to work, many of the integrative measures we take can be safe and have not necessarily been disproven (yet).
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How Far Have We Come With Integrative Medicine?
Both CAM and integrative health have their limitations and shortcomings, as an article on holistic health in the Western Journal of Medicine describes. But most things in life fall short of the hoped-for outcome a good deal of the time.
I find it interesting that the above article talking about the advantages and shortcomings of a holistic health approach was published in 1982.
The author concludes the article with the thought: “It is certainly time to create model holistic programs in a variety of communities and in conventional medical settings, to assess whether a combination of health promotion and public education of Western and alternative approaches can meet people's health needs more effectively and less expensively than the present system.”
Sure, wouldn’t we still like to see that happen over 30 years since the paper’s author thought it was a good idea?
Wishing you and your family the best of health.
Cheers,
Trevis
