Personalized Preventive Medicine (PPM): A Type of Integrative Medicine
Integrative Medicine is best defined as an approach and professional mind-set that views an individual patient in a more expansive way. Instead of focusing primarily on a patient’s main symptoms and likely disease process and specific treatments, Integrative Medicine attempts to focus on the whole patient. This includes all medical problems, remote or current, that may or may not be linked to the primary disease process. This approach requires a firm commitment to try to discover all causative or exacerbating elements behind a person’s health problems. Integrative medical practitioners need to possess a unique collection of both skills and focus to best understand and treat patients from an integrative standpoint.
Name and Blame versus Think and Link.
Too often in the now common “brief” medical interactions between a physician and a patient, a type of “name and blame” mind-set is frequently seen. In this type of approach, a diagnosis is often quickly given, then mentally “blamed” (e.g. “you have high blood pressure”, “you have arthritis”) followed by the addition of a “summary diagnosis” to the patient’s “problem list” Once on “the problem list”, the main treatment approach often becomes the use of a traditional medical drug followed by whether the chosen drug is covered by the patient’s insurance plan.
Individual patients often possess a unique combination of medical problems, past medical history, family history, environmental exposures, current and remote symptoms, physical findings, and associated laboratory and X-ray findings. While two patients may have the same problem list, the treatment plans are often very different when assessed by Personalized Preventive Medicine (PPM).
Personalized Preventive Medicine utilizes a “think and link” approach replacing the “name and blame” approach. This strategy seeks to discover common mechanisms of disease or “links” between the list of medical problems and the patient’s past medical, family, or environmental history. With this approach a more helpful “integrative problem list” is carefully formulated.
Personalized Preventive Medicine utilizes the skills and experience of a multiple board-certified cardiologist together with detailed and focused histories and physical examinations, relevant diagnostic studies, non-invasive and invasive testing, and specialized blood tests and urine collections -all used to develop personalized treatment plans. The treatment plans are less pharmaceutical drug based and more inclusive of treatment options that utilize life style changes, along with nutritional and herbal supplements. The increasing recognition of imbalanced key biochemical pathways has become a major focus of Integrative Medicine.