Gooding, who is working to integrate alternative medicines into Western health care systems, spoke on the current state of health care in the United States and specified how alternative forms of medicine, those where a mind/body connection is regarded as important in treating disease and illness, could help reduce spiraling health care costs.
"We have a health care crisis in this country," Gooding said. "Our worry is that if we cut costs, we cut quality." Gooding cited cancer treatment as an example and discussed two specific concerns: the treatments are often toxic and sometimes catastrophic, and the statistics on cancer are staying the same or, in some cases, going up. "The war on cancer has not been won," she said.
Gooding noted that the United States spends twice the amount of any other country on health care, and very little of the money spent goes to prevention. "We're limiting our models and possibilities for treatment," she said. Citing "the tomato fallacy," the 19th-century belief that tomatoes were poisonous, Gooding said that Western medicine has a tendency to lock itself into only one frame of thought. "What we're doing is spending more money for less returns," she said. "There are other models."
In ancient Greece, Gooding said, two older models of health care still in existence emphasize the mind/body connection, which the medical world has a difficult time accepting. "We can ask the question: `What is the effect that my feelings and emotions have on my health?' In truth, there is a phenomenal impact." Gooding cited case studies to prove the point, including one where researchers found that the best single predictor of heart attacks was job satisfaction and overall happiness. Another study of the elderly showed that those people who thought their health was excellent were seven times as likely to live longer than those who thought their health was poor.
"We can use this mind/ body access to our advantage," Gooding said. "We're talking about something as simple as people talking to one another." She said it was important, at this stage, to focus on preventative medicine and look at possible underlying causes of illness. Stressing the "whole person" approach to illness, Gooding said that more information and control for the patient was needed and that "all aspects of a disease are important."
Finally, Gooding urged the medical community to "get over the tomato fallacy ... it's very important to keep our hearts and minds open to changing the way we look at medicine."
-- Danielle Service