What an incredible event and incredible community at this years IPM Congress. Full of such knowledgable doctors, practitioners, companies – who are all greatly informed by research and their own professional practice. The congress is all about being holistic – thinking about the whole person – whether promoting health and wellbeing or dealing with disease.
I came away thinking it is now getting blatantly scandalous that healthcare systems are designed to wait for people to be sick to take action? Here were examples of health coaches helping patients reduce diabetes medication or come of their pain meds. People using the latest technology to better monitor their conditions through APPs on their phones. Knowledge of nutrition and lifetyle that now suggests that chronic diseases even like some dementias can be prevented. Of course, because national healthcare systems don’t support many of these initiatives at enough scale, as integrative is now rolling out, so is more massive health inequality as it is the domain of the private provider.
Bravo to everyone at the event though who are challenging these inequalities:
🌼to the self employed health coaches who give sessions for free.
🌱for a mould detection company who offered free screening if people were really in need.
🌼to those who give bursaries to help others get trained.
🌱to those who provide discounted clinical consultations.
🌼to all of the organisations fighting for change.
We need a mindset change from disease care to healthcare:
🌱Keep raising the voices of IPM and organisations like National Centre for Integrative Medicine who are building strong communities.
🌼Let’s step out of our silos – quite often people in professions don’t work together because they are members of different professional bodies.
🌱 Education in medical schools, nursing shools etc. People can drive change from the bottom up – we all know that politics and big corps are loathed to change.
🌼More diverse voices in all of these conversations.
People deserve better lives and this should be achievable with the knowledge we have that parts of our food systems and medication often creates more illness.