Achieving wellness

June 8, 1999
Web posted at: 12:13 PM EDT (1613 GMT)

In this story: Increasing popularity of complementary and alternative approaches Contribution to wellness A holistic approach RELATEDS

By Pat Carolan

(WebMD) -- What are you doing to maintain your emotional wellness? With the high cost of physical and mental health care and the constraints on coverage, especially for mental-health treatment, prevention of emotional problems makes sense.

An increasing number of Americans are opting for an alternative road to wellness. Instead of pharmaceutical medications for stress, anxiety, depression or hypertension, their treatments of choice now include yoga, meditation, biofeedback, visualization, self-esteem training and acupuncture.

Increasing popularity of complementary and alternative approaches

Once these treatments were disparaged by the health-care community and regarded by most people as within the realm of the longhaired-and-beaded counterculture. Now complementary and alternative approaches to health and mental health, defined as treatments and practices generally not taught in medical schools, used in hospitals or reimbursed by medical insurance, have entered the mainstream.

Americans now spend over $20 billion annually for complementary medicine, most of it out-of-pocket, and they're seeing complementary practitioners at an ever-increasing rate, says David E. Bresler, Ph.D., an associate clinical professor at the UCLA Medical School, a psychologist in private practice and a licensed acupuncturist. A number of medical schools now teach some type of complementary medicine.

Contributing to this trend have been:

Contribution to wellness

Techniques that facilitate relaxation, reduce stress or teach people to feel good about themselves contribute to physical health as well as to mental health. A high stress level can be a contributing culprit in health problems ranging from hypertension, insomnia, heart disease and gastrointestinal distress to depression and anxiety disorders. Having a positive self-image and a positive outlook on life will not only reduce your susceptibility to depression, but may also improve your physical health.

A holistic approach

"One of the things that needs to be emphasized is the mind-body connection. There's a persistence in our culture to separate the two that's difficult to overcome," says Stephen A. Appelbaum, Ph.D., visiting professor at Harvard Medical School and author of the recently released "The Mystery of Healing." "A person is a unit. You cannot do anything to one part that doesn't involve the rest of the person."

Alternative techniques are more likely to recognize that interconnection. "Once you grant the holism, or integral wholeness of the person, you're open to a wide variety of interventions which may not be logically linked to your symptoms, but are effective," Appelbaum continues. "The relaxation technique can be used to calm down after a busy day's work, but it also can be used to treat cancer, arthritis, etc."

Similarly, visualization, or guided imagery, the most common self-help technique, can be used in managing stress or anxiety-provoking situations. But, says Bresler, it can also be used to augment cancer therapy or for pain control. "Ultimately it will be the power of the mind that will be the most therapeutic intervention."

Are alternative approaches to wellness a fad? Bresler doesn't think so. "We have to teach people how to take better care of their health. Many of us have been talking about preventive techniques, but now we have no choice -- we can't afford to do it any other way. So what will the new medicine look like? There's going to be a very strong emphasis on self-management and on taking care of oneself. If you look at the self-management techniques that people use, they make a lot of sense -- meditation, relaxation and stress management, exercise, healthy diet, proper sleep hygiene -- these are all things that definitely benefit our health."

Copyright 1999 by WebMD, Inc. All rights reserved.

RELATEDS AT :

How to Use Alternative and Complementary Medicine
Making Sense of Complementary Medicine Research

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