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Approach the care of patients as a cooperative endeavor, integrating patient’s concerns and ensuring that patient health needs are addressed.

Integrative Health Elective

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Completed Modules List

In the month of January, I completed an elective on Integrative and Complementary Health at the OSU Integrative Health Center. I had prior experience with herbal medicines, acupuncture and chiropractic medicine but never delved into osteopathic medicine, ayurveda, or mind-body interventions. This month was very eye-opening and I learned a lot about the supplements and alternative therapies that can be used in conjunction with modern Western medicine to not only lengthen but also improve quality of peoples’ lives.

My experience in integrative health truly enhanced my understanding of patient care. The primary care physicians at the integrative health center took an extensive medical history and spent anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour with each patient. This was a completely different approach from the 15-20 minute encounters I’ve seen in other internal medicine clinics. During that time, I learned more about the patients’ lives and personal stresses that greatly impacted their health and ability to access health care. The PCPs were able to review patients’ current medications and also advise certain vitamins and supplements as well as refer patients to nutritionists and mind-body therapists among others. In this way, my integrative health elective taught me about more ways that I can practice health promotion and disease prevention outside of the traditional Western medications.

I believe I will definitely utilize my knowledge from this elective in my future practice. Whether I pursue primary care or a specialty, my knowledge about alternative medicine can be used to provide great patient care. During my month long elective, I also completed an herbs and dietary supplements course through OSU. This was very informative and I am planning on furthering my integrative health education through the Integrative Medicine Pilot program offered this spring to OSU medical students.

Health Coaching

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During my first year of medical school, I found health coaching to be an interesting concept but was also skeptical about its effectiveness. Essentially health coaches meet with patients who have chronic health issues such as diabetes, smoking, alcoholism and spend time formulating ways to improve a patient’s health. The health coach does not provide solutions but instead helps guide the patient to create her own step by step plan on improving health. This seemed rather inefficient as the discussion would take a long time and the patient would need to be motivated to start thinking about making a lifestyle change. However after our simulated health coaching sessions, I could see the benefits of this method of coaching. A patient has the luxury of sitting down with a professional to discuss her health and leaves the session with a reasonable plan to improve her health. Furthermore, the patient gains a sense of accomplishment from generating a plan from her own ideas that would fit well with her personal schedule. Finally, the patient is able to stay on task by meeting frequently with a health coach to track her progress and adjust the plan accordingly. Therefore I gained a newfound appreciation for health coaching through this exercise. I was also able to help out other medical students as my video was used as part of an e-module for health coaching.

I chose to use health coaching as a demonstration of the patient care competency as it emphasizes the idea that patient care is a cooperative endeavor. The old idea of a paternalistic physician is no longer and is now replaced by informed and interactive decision making. Health coaching really displayed this idea as it attempts to draw out solutions for disease prevention and health promotion by encouraging patients to suggest ideas that are feasible for them.

In my future career, I plan to recommend health coaching to my patients so they can reap the long term benefits from this practice.

The video below shows the longer version of my health coaching interview session where the patient and I discussed small steps to help better control her diabetes.

https://vitals.osumc.edu/articulate/4737/player.html <– shorter version on slide 9