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is looked upon as a new paradigm, rapidly replacing the
traditional medical paradigm which is based on authority. There is an emphasis
on the dissemination of information, as well as its collection, so that the
evidence can reach clinical practice. It therefore has commonality with the idea
of research-based practice. 4Healing is designed to collect, maintain, analyze, and
disseminate practitioner, practice, treatment, and
treatment outcome information in a way that significantly benefits patients,
employers, health plans, physicians, and practitioners.
In Addition to Mainstream Medicine, We Track Holistic and Integrative
Medicine:
Taking A New Look At Integrative and Holistic Medicine (IHM) and Therapies
In spite of the enormous and growing popularity of IHM – and
multiple examples of remarkable successes with IHM, there has been a reluctance
by many in the healthcare community to adopt or accept IHM therapies because
there have been few clinical trials to conclusively demonstrate their efficacy.
It is said that the evidence for the efficacy of IHM therapies is anecdotal.
Physicians are constantly under peer review, and most would not mind increased
scrutiny, but,
paradoxically, the evidence for practitioner competence and treatment
efficacy in mainstream medicine is somewhat anecdotal, and in many cases
less documented than some IHM therapies. Physicians as well as
patients can benefit from the critical information collected by the Company to
enhance the chances of successful treatment outcomes.
Abundance of Scientific Literature Supporting Integrative Holistic
Therapies
In fact,
there are may thousands of studies that demonstrate the efficacy of holistic and
integrative therapies (see
Science).
Contemporary fads often color what we see as progressive and
modern treatment. We can look back at the popularity of the healing water spas
in the early 1800s or the patent medicine cure-alls of the 1880s and 1890s. The
words scientific and modern were commonly used to market these forms of
treatment and many treatments looked on as useless or even dangerous today were
endorsed by respected physicians of those periods. On the other hand, many
popular therapies dismissed by the medical community as unsubstantiated in the
past, upon closer examination have been shown to be effective. Dr. William
Fair, former head of urology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering says:
When I was in medical school, acupuncture was thought to
be really hocus-pocus. We now know (especially in the area of oncology) that
nausea and vomiting can be very effectively controlled by acupuncture.
The research process is slow and expensive. According to the
Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America, the cost of moving a new drug
through the development process in the US averages $500 million. While a drug
patent gives a company exclusive rights for twenty years to develop and market a
new drug, development and approval take up about twelve to fifteen of those
years. That leaves a short period of exclusivity for a drug manufacturer to
recoup the cost of development. Only about 1 out of every 5,000 drugs tested in
US pharmaceutical labs survives the development process to reach the
marketplace.
If a remedy is already in use, or has been described in
the scientific literature, it cannot be patented. Many IHM treatments,
derived from age-old remedies, cannot be patented, so they are not
cost-effective products for companies to pursue. In response to this dilemma,
the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has begun to
provide funding for the study of promising IHM treatments that don't offer the
promise of high monetary profit that patent exclusivity provides.
HMOs often request scientific proof of effectiveness before
they will cover an integrative or complementary treatment. This forces medical
organizations to limit their range of treatment recommendations to those that
are standardized or evidence-based. 4Healing
is designed to provide that evidence to health plans so that more and more HMOs
and Health Plans will cover treatments that work from practitioners who are
effective, and saving money for the HMO.
Until the
4Healing model, the demand for
written proof has put IHM therapies at a disadvantage. Many of them are based on
observation, but have not yet been formally studied in clinical trials. As
previously mentioned, clinical trials can be extremely expensive and difficult
to finance unless a chance of profit on a disease with millions of patients can
be predicted.
We need reliable information on expected outcomes and side
effects of non-standard therapies as well as an honest evaluation of what
aspects need further study – the same quality of information as we expect to be
given for standard treatment regimens. 4Healing
is designed to answer these needs.
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