by: Dr. Kiara Galbreath

We are faced with a health care system which is becoming increasingly unable to look after the changing needs of the community. More and more, people are looking to alternative ways of healing with the goal of having a more fulfilling and satisfying life.

Natural health care is becoming more main stream. Now, in Canada, at least one in every three people is searching out natural health practitioners. Even the hospitals are getting requests from their long term care patients and also from those who are in hospices, actively searching out other methods of making their lives better for whatever length of time they have left.

We, in the natural health care community, need to make it possible for people who have not as yet ventured into this very fascinating world we have, to find ways to access this natural health care network. The time has come when we need to network with our colleagues in the health care system so that they can find what their patients are looking for.

A few years ago, my partner, Dr. Richard Kitchen and myself, Dr. Kiara Galbreath, were asked to lead a study group of McMaster medical students and the focus of this group was to answer a question that they had received from the patients at the Henderson Hospital in Hamilton. The question was: “The patients at the Palliative Care Unit at Henderson Hospital would like to be referred by their doctors for alternative natural therapy. How would you refer?”

Needless to say, these medical students did not even know where to begin. We started by telling them what natural therapies were available in this area and what they were useful for. We then had to start telling them how they could access information on trained practitioners and how to be able to determine the quality of care.

This question opens the door for natural therapies to be recognized for their worth and for those trained in natural techniques to be able to bridge the gap between these two very different approaches to health care.

Those of us who have trained in the natural therapies need to start to open a means of communicating with the medical system of care. Thus, we will be able to recognize the strengths in both approaches to health care and work together to make individuals who are interested in using both methods of treatment, optimize their health.

Read Dr. Kiara Galbreath's Biography

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