Maja Jurisic, MD, CPE, vice president and medical director of strategic accounts at Concentra®, is a leader in applying research findings to improve patient care. Board certified in emergency medicine and occupational medicine, Jurisic is a leading advocate for a pain ladder alternative that actively reduces opioid consumption. She served as a consultant to various states on a federal initiative to improve return-to-work and retention outcomes for injured employees.
Sometimes finding the right solution to a problem requires broadening our perspective.
For example, in recent articles I have explained how digestive health and the synergy between our gut and our brain can help with recovery after a workplace accident.
However, exploring these health factors is not part of the traditional care approach. Sometimes the tools available in conventional medicine are not adequate, and certain complementary therapies could offer an effective way forward.
The dominant paradigm
When I was in medical school, the paradigm or model of how the human body worked was twofold.
In some placements (e.g. in orthopedics), the dominant paradigm of the body was that it was a machine whose parts sometimes broke down or wore out and needed to be “repaired” or replaced.
In other rotations (e.g., internal medicine), the biomedical model described the human body as a chemical factory. Disease was primarily seen as a situation in which the normal chemical environment was thrown out of balance and other chemicals (in the form of pills or injections) were administered to restore proper functioning of the body.
The paradigm that was (and still is) widely taught in medical schools was mechanistic and reductionist – reducing the complexity of the body to a simple set of biological causes.
At no time did anyone mention that the mind and body were interconnected or that perhaps the mind, body and spirit needed to communicate and align so that we could not only help patients improve their physical function, but also their total well-being. Alternative therapies such as energy healing focus on aspects of health beyond the physical.
Energy medicine
Energy medicine uses transmissions of particular intensities and frequencies that stimulate repair of one or more tissues or allow built-in healing mechanisms to function more effectively.
These energies can come from the environment, another human being, or a medical device, helping to restore balance to the body’s systems.
We now know that many of the most common and costly diseases and disorders are caused by chronic inflammation and are best described in terms of energy. If energy is taken out of the equation, they are difficult to prevent or treat.
The most documented energy fields are the bioelectric flows produced during the functioning of the heart, brain and muscles. We know them thanks to the technologies that measure them: electrocardiography (ECG), electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG).
It has been shown that even tiny energy fields can have biological effects. This helps explain how low-energy oscillating fields from medical devices, pharmaceuticals and even essential oils, botanical and homeopathic remedies, as well as the human voice and hand, can activate a large number of processes cellular.
Acupuncture and sound healing
We learned that cells communicate by biological fields, or biologically generated fields. The discipline of biofield science is growing, providing a scientific basis for increasingly used energy therapies, such as acupuncture and sound healing.
Acupuncture originally from China and has been used in one form or another for at least 2,500 years. This treatment method is most often used to treat pain (e.g., back, joints, neck) and inflammation.
A National Health Interview Survey revealed a 50% increase in the number of acupuncture users between 2002 and 2012, and it is approved for use in workers’ compensation in many states.
I am particularly fascinated by the increase use of sound for diagnosis and treatment.
Sound is caused by vibrations passing through matter in the form of waves. The vibrations travel through the skin, bones and fluids of our body, making our entire system receptive to sound vibrations.
Even frequencies too high or too low to be heard by the human ear are recorded as vibrations through our nervous system.
Inaudible frequencies are commonly used in medicine. An example is ultrasound in obstetrics. It is also used to examine internal organs (e.g., liver, kidneys), and physical therapists use it therapeutically to facilitate tissue healing.
In 2015, researchers at Columbia University published a study revealing that primary cilia (i.e. the antenna-like structures on our cell membranes) receive and respond to vibrational energy fields such as sound, light and radio frequencies. They quiver like a tuning fork, and if an environmental vibration resonates with the receiver’s antenna, it changes the protein charges and causes the cell to change shape.
This means that sound waves could have the ability to remodel cellular structures in ways that could help treat diseases linked to defects in primary cilia, such as arthritis, polycystic kidney disease, obesity, insufficiency heart disease and even cancer.
Removing the “Alternative” label
Albert Szent-Gyorgyiwinner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937, once said: “In every culture and medical tradition before ours, healing was achieved by moving energy. »
Modern science is discovering evidence of the effectiveness of some energy healing practices that were previously considered “alternative.” This not only opens up new avenues of research and new possibilities for future treatments; it also allows health professionals to complete the paradigm of how the human body functions.
If we analyze the whole by focusing on its parts, we gain precision in our descriptions. But we achieve this at the cost of losing sight of the bigger picture: the cooperative movement of energy throughout our system that enables higher levels of health and performance.
As complementary treatment methods continue to undergo clinical studies to analyze their effectiveness and safety, a broader range of effective modalities will become available to enable injured employees to achieve better outcomes. &
