Integrated Medicine and IRIIM- A perspective

IRIIM is pioneering the study of integrated medicine in India in a conscious way and towards this end.
IRIIM is keen to develop fraternal relations with any individual or organization in this country or abroad willing to work towards the betterment of the quality of life.

In the following paragraphs an attempt has been made to briefly outline the role of IRIIM in the context of responding to the four different levels of challenges as mentioned above.

1. Social Challenge
   
2. Philosophical Challenge
   
3. Cultural Challenge
   
4. Economic Challenge
   

• Social Challenge :

  Integrated medicine is born out of Universal illness.
  
  Health for all is not just a question of modern health care delivery systems. In the developed world, due to the existence of various social security systems, even the poorest of the poor have access to at least some form of modern health care despite the very high cost. But one can hardly argue with any degree of conviction that populations in the developed countries are healthy in every sense of the term given the very high incidence there of Cardiac and Carcinogenic Disorders, Hypertension, AIDS or Psychological Neurosis arising from the stress and strain of living in a post-modern high speed environment threatening technological civilization. As for Health for All in the less developed world, the less said the better. The concept of integrated medicine is born in the womb of such postmodern universal illness. Right from its genesis, integrated medicine is a holistic concept and its point of departure is the recognition that the issue of health cannot be properly understood in isolation from the broader issues of the interrelationships between Man and Society and between Man and Nature. Integrated Medicine and IRIIM, therefore, approach all questions of health keeping in mind the significance of the interrelationships between the three distinct but interdependent levels of health - individual, social and natural or ecological.
  
  
  

• Philosophical Challenge :

  Integrated Medicine treats the patient and not the disease.
  
  Whether it is the question of working out an appropriate therapeutic modality for any given individual suffering from any set of pathological conditions or whether it is the question of conceiving, developing and implementing any appropriate health care delivery system for any given population, Integrated Medicine adopts a systems view and takes into consideration the impact of the social or environmental milieu on the given individual or on the given population while working out the answers. 'System thinking' is process thinking and hence the systems view sees health in terms of an ongoing change, reflecting the organism's creative response to environmental challenges. Since a person's condition will always depend significantly on the natural and social environment, there can be no absolute level of health, independent of this environment. This interdependence is manifested through the rhythms of life. In the classics of different Traditional Medicine like Hippocratic medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda etc. this dynamic notion of body-environment interrelationship can be noticed. But this notion gradually neglected through ages in the area of Modern Medical Sciences. The differences between Modern Medicine and post-modern integrated Medicine are similar to the differences between Newtonian Mechanics or the Physics of separate particles born out of the same cultural and philosophical background as the industrial Revolution and Classical Physics on the one hand and modern {Physics or Ecology born out of the cultural and philosophical background of the ongoing post-industrial, post-modern era of human history on the other. While Newtonian Physics and Modern Medicine tends to be reductive & analytic and view the events or individuals as discrete particles very like the balls on a billiard table interacting in linear time sequence only when they collide and not having any interpenetration or intercommunication with each other. The Modern Physics, Ecology or post-modern i9ntegrated Medicine tend to the synthetic & intuitive and see the synchronous occurrence of different phenomena that form a particular pattern. This sharp dichotomy between the two philosophical approaches has major implications for both theory and practice of health care for deciding what therapeutic modalities are to be adopted for treating particular conditions.
  
  
  

• Cultural Challenge :

  Integrated Medicine seeks to preserve the heritage of the past by integrating it with the break through of the future.
  
  The crushing wheels of the modern technological civilization tend to destroy the entire varied heritage to our past. Predominantly, in the eyes of Modern Medicine, all traditional and alternative therapeutic modalities are just so much mumbo jumbo of the prehistoric medicine man. But the crisis of modernity is upon us and it is growing daily to the extent that to tackle this crisis, modern man today has no alternative but to hark back to the dim and distant past and to the rich heritage of the sum total of human knowledge that our ancestors has delivered us. The efficacy of ancient or traditional systems of therapy such as Acupuncture & Moxibustion (Traditional Chinese Medicine), Yoga, Ayurveda or Unani is now being rediscovered. In the classics of these Traditional therapeutic schools one can discern that a dynamic notion of body-environment interrelationship forms the philosophical basis of these schools. Besides the traditional therapies mentioned above, one may also mention two other relatively modern but otherwise holistic approaches to health care, namely Naturopathy and Homoeopathy which too have many adherents today. In short, IRIIM looks at all traditional and alternative healing arts not as relics of the past but as the not-yet-fully discovered frontiers of the future. IRIIM seeks to place all traditional and alternative therapies in general, and Acupuncture & Moxibustion, Yoga and Naturopathy in particular, at the forefront of medical research so long as they represent fully worked out, rational, cost-effective and safe systems of medicine or health care based on the post-modern philosophy of synthesis and holism.
  
  
  

• Economic Challenge :

  Integrated Medicine focuses on use value and not exchange value.
  
  In this age of commodity fetish where the demand for and the supply of almost everything are determined by market forces, health and health care ton have become commodities that are bought and sold on the market. Doctors are today taking courses in business management to ensure proper management of their earnings, hospitals have become corporatised, drug companies bother more about their bottom lines rather than the insidious side effects that their products may have on patients, patients are spending more and more money in buying medical insurance cover as the bill for treatment of even a common cold may eat up a month's salary and consumer courts are being set up to deliver judgment on malpractices in the buying and selling of health care. Integrated Medicine and IRIIM seek to reverse this process of alienation and instead return and integrate health to its rightful owner-the individual integrated Medicine, therefore, focuses on the doctor-patient relationship and urges the patient to participate as much as the doctor in an integrated manner in the healing process. And, in such a way what health care becomes easily available and at a low cost by lowering the dependence of the patient on high cost drugs or unnecessary surgical procedures through diet control and adoption of natural and healthy way of life. Integrated Medicine also focuses on the development of manpower dedicated to the cause of proving health carte as a service to Mankind-as an use value essential for healthy, humble existence rather than as an exchange value to be bought and sold on the market for commercial gain. To that end, IRIIM is engaged in the task of developing appropriate and trained manpower who will provide health care to suffering humanity as their main mission in life rather than merely a lucrative career. Also, as a long-term goal, IRIIM intends to develop into a full-fledged medical college which can offer degree courses in integrated medicine in a fashion such that health workers, irrespective of their previous educational background, get an opportunity to progressively expand their knowledge horizon by going through more and more advanced courses.