Cost Savings With Clinical Solutions: The Impact of Reforming Health and Health Care Economics With Integrative Therapies

With all the time, effort, heated debates, and battles that have taken place to date on health care, the discussion has actually been limited to reforming our health care economics but has not been focused on a genuine reform of health care itself. Therefore, as the effort to revise the US health care system unfolds, it is imperative that we evaluate and implement integrative strategies that will yield genuine and substantial cost savings while having a favorable impact on patient care. Before going forward, it is essential to acknowledge that without broadening the existing medical model, we will continue to perpetuate our inadequate and costly health care system. Integrative treatments have the potential to reduce health care costs in a remarkable number of ways—from providing effective approaches for prevention to relieving treatment consequences. For instance, integrative lifestyle counseling may reduce the need for certain prescriptive medications, shrinking not only the initial costs for these drugs but ultimately the number of adverse drug reactions. With hospitalizations for adverse reactions to prescription medications running to 1.6 million annually and deaths amounting to more than 100 000 per year, such reactions are definitely contributing to runaway health care costs. So too is the lack of educating and training Americans in new health care behaviors. Over the past few decades, we Americans have become a sick society. The scourges of obesity, diabetes, and cancer continue to escalate with almost no success at prevention and only limited success with treatment. When it comes to cancer, the publicized survival breakthroughs are measured in a few weeks to a few months. The need to fix our system is beyond desperate in light of the financial and clinical health crises we find our country in. A disease prevention model should be core to any reform. Introducing a variety of preventative measures is crucial if we are going to right our sinking health care system while encouraging a healthier American populace. The purpose of this article is to present some of the immediate and long-term benefits of introducing integrative therapies to counter certain consequences of invasive treatments. Implementing such treatments can help defray the costs burdening the US medical care system. A previous editorial discussed a systematic review of studies of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) techniques compared with conventional therapies used for the same clinical conditions. This included a cost-effectiveness analysis. Of these studies, 7 found that CAM therapy outcomes were significantly better than conventional methods but had lower or similar costs: 4 CAM therapy outcomes were similar to conventional outcomes but had lower or similar costs; 4 CAM therapy outcomes were better than conventional outcomes, but had higher costs; and 1 CAM therapy had similar outcomes but higher costs. Examples include the following: a relaxation tape used before colon surgery reduced the length of hospital stay by 1.6 days, at a cost savings of $3200 per patient, whereas hypnosis as an adjunct to sedation for interventional radiology produced a savings of $338, along with reductions in both oversedation and undersedation. Parenteral glutamine given to adult bone marrow transplant (BMT) patients in a 1994 study resulted in a reduced hospital stay of 1 full week with a savings of $21 095 per patient.