Webinar on integrative medicine approach for mental healthcare held
Why and how can an integrative medicine approach work for mental healthcare? This was the topic of discussion at a webinar, part of The Hindu Wellness Series, held on Saturday.
Giving an overview about health and medicine, Bhushan Patwardhan, national research professor, Ministry of Ayush, Government of India, said that medicines treated diseases: they did not give individuals their health. Mental healthcare, Prof. Patwardhan said, continued to be under-resourced despite multiple studies now bringing to light the fact that a significant number of people lived with mental illnesses.
“The silos of medicine should be dissolved,” he said. Health professionals must take the best available from both traditional and modern systems of medicine by putting the patient at the centre of the system in order to give them the best care, he said.
Yoga as a form of therapy for mental healthcare has now been studied and has proved effective, said B. N. Gangadhar, professor emeritus, department of integrative medicine, NIMHANS, Bengaluru. Detailing several studies where yoga has shown to be of benefit in both depression and schizophrenia, Dr. Gangadhar also pointed to the fact that for many patients, a complementary medicine approach was empowering: they felt that they were doing something to help with their illness, and this was beneficial. There was a need for more, multi-centre trials, but there was potential for it to serve as an alternative form of treatment, with precautions, he said.
The need for an integrated approach is being felt, said Ennapadam S. Krishnamoorthy, behavioural neurologist and neuropsychiatrist and founder, Buddhi Clinic, because advances in science when it comes to drugs are slow, and access to them, in the developing world, are slower and sometimes expensive, potentially placing barriers to care. One of the advantages to an integrated approach was that it tapped into another barrier: that of acceptability – with India’s history of traditional medicine, many patients are willing to try complementary approaches, with another advantage being that families too, can get involved in care. A range of non-pharmacological healing systems could be tried for mental healthcare, Dr. Krishnamoorthy said, if they were locally available and culturally acceptable – but as in all approaches, detailed assessments and diagnostics along with monitoring of outcomes was crucial.
Members of the audience posed several questions to the experts about the need for more research, the integration of a multi-disciplinary approach in the primary care settings and on doctor-patient-caregiver communication among others.
The webinar was presented by the Buddhi Clinic, Chennai.
A video of the webinar is available here: bit.ly/3Mje5X2
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