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I'm Charles Elder and I study Complementary and Integrative Medicine at the Kaiser Permanente
Center for Health Research.
I was a full-time primary care physician, practicing conventional medicine for 7 or
8 years, but with time I became a little bit frustrated with my job because I found that
the conventional medicine model was too narrow for primary care.
Over the years, I had familiarized myself with some complementary and integrative medicine
modalities and systems and I sent a proposal to the leadership of primary care, suggesting
that we pilot some of these complementary approaches to see if our patients would get
better results and if we could have improved patient satisfaction.
Patients really liked it, and over time, that part of my practice grew and grew, such that
now it's become a considerable part of my practice.
Overeating at night is really bad news.
I have a referral-based natural health clinic, which is based upon Ayurveda.
And at that clinic I teach them some basic concepts of self care, diet, daily routine,
stress management, exercise and so on.
There are people who may have, say chronic abdominal pain, and may have been to multiple
specialists and have had multiple procedures, and they come to our clinic and learn some
very simple dietary prescriptions which enable them to improve quite a bit.
But to really apply these on a larger scale in our health care system, we really needed
more data.
WHEN IS COMPLEMENTARY THERAPY MORE EFFECTIVE THAN CONVENTIONAL THERAPY?
In managing chronic musculoskeletal pain, it's common to prescribe long-acting opioids
on an ongoing basis, but there's really no evidence that it works, and in fact, there's
plenty of evidence to suggest that it's harmful.
On the other hand, acupuncture has been shown effective, and yet is greatly underutilized
by our system.
I think complementary and integrative medicine is becoming more accepted,and one of the things
that we can accomplish by doing research in this area is to help us to understand which
of these approaches are most effective and are most appropriate for integration.
WHAT WOULD PEOPLE BE SURPRISED TO LEARN ABOUT YOU?
People are surprised when they learn that I spend two hours every day with a meditation
practice.
And people wonder how I find the time, but the fact of the matter is that when I meditate,
then the rest of the day I'm a lot more focused and effective.
And I get a lot more done than I would if I skipped that practice.