Integrative Medicine ‘the Best of Both Worlds’

As most of us in South Africa are only too well aware, we are experiencing severe, intractable problems in providing effective and affordable healthcare for all our citizens. The costs incurred in diagnosis, drug and other therapies, finance and administration are escalating strongly, in common with most countries. Unfortunately, this is happening at a time when more and more demands are being made on our exchequer for the management of the HIV/Aids epidemic, and its unwelcome attendants tuberculosis, pneumonia and a number of devastating infections. On top of this, we can expect a substantial rise in chronic lifestyle-related conditions such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes and lipid disorders. It gets worse: global warming is expected to bring its own bumper crop of ailments, particularly malaria. Is orthodox medicine in South Africa capable of dealing satisfactorily with this situation? If the consensus is that it is not, and that alternative sources for providing healthcare for the population as a whole should be examined, then a number of options emerge. One option is to encourage and support the broader use of African Traditional medicine. The impact of this system can be substantially improved by encouraging better application of training, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, in the context of benign regulation. Another option, the subject of this article, is to consider formally introducing integrative medicine. This system, in a word, combines the most suitable elements of orthodox medical system and complementary medicine as equal partners in the provision of healthcare to our population. In theory, perhaps a commendable idea; in practice, does it have a meaningful future in our South African healthcare scenario? This is not an academic discussion on the relative merits of different healing paradigms, because worldwide there is a substantial swing away from orthodox to complementary medicine. For example, the use of complementary medicine is at an all-time high in the USA, Australia and the UK, with more than 42% resorting to non-orthodox healing practices.