The Whole Systems Medicine of Tomorrow: A Half-Century Perspective

Abstract

M 2 W hen I stopped my clinical practice five years ago, I began consulting physicians interested in developing a more integrative and holistic practice. Part of the consultation was to shadow those physicians for two or three days. These experiences led me to believe it would be informative to visit the offices of more physicians who called themselves integrative or holistic to observe what was occurring. As I shadowed an additional 20 physicians in the Minnesota Holistic Physician Group, I was profoundly moved by their wisdom, integrity, compassion, and clinical skills. I was also delighted and impressed with the desire of many patients and their partners to become actively engaged in their own healing process. I was so moved that at times I found myself laughing or crying right during the office visit, or later in the evening when I was writing about my experiences of the day. That never happened when I was mentoring family medicine residents—those experiences often left me sad and depressed. So I asked myself: What was the difference between the exhilaration of one clinical experience and the depression of the other? What was it that filled me with joy and hope for the future of our profession? Could it be that when mind, body, spirit, environmental, and social factors are routinely part of a patient’s evaluation, it truly makes a difference? This essay is my attempt to answer those questions and to envision how we can teach the energy, knowledge, and skills of holistic integrative physicians to a majority of primary care medical practices. First, here is a brief history of medical practice as I have observed it over the past 50 years.