Medical errors: is integrative medicine the solution?

I have moaned about the JACM several times on this blog (for instance here). It is a very poor journal, in my view, but it nevertheless is important because it is the one with the highest impact factor in this field. Despite all this I missed something important that recently happened to the JACM: a few months ago, it got a new editor in chief: John Weeks.

Had I been more attentive, I would have known this already in May when Weeks wrote in the HuffPo this: “I was asked a month ago, out of the blue, if I would like to become editor-in-chief of the first peer-reviewed, indexed journal in what is now the “integrative health and medicine” field. The journal was born 20 years ago when — as my father would have put it — “integrative medicine” was hardly a gleam in anyone’s eye. The publication is the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.”

I have a vague memory of meeting him once at a conference and sitting next to him during a dinner. For those who haven’t heard of him, here is how he once described himself:

I have been involved as an organizer-writer in the emerging fields of complementary, alternative and integrative medicine since 1983. Happily, I have learned some things. I was once called an “expert in alternative medicine” by Medical Economics and later an “alternative care (integration) expert” by Modern Healthcare. The name-calling was proud-making, even if I was so-dubbed by reporters who were on their first forays into the field.

Both anointed me before I went on sabbatical in Costa Rica and later Nicaragua with my family in 2002. Part of the reason for sabbatical was that whatever expertise I may have developed often ran frustratingly short of being able to offer robust, successful business models with readers and clients. More than once I counseled people against the initiatives they planned. Trends taught me to recognize the invisible handwriting of a sure failure event behind the bubbling enthusiasm of an initiate. I needed a break from the work. My family and I took it!

I was away from the United States for three years. I had my hand back in things for the last 2.5 years. I assisted a philanthropist on her integrative medicine investments in community clinics, CAM schools and academic health centers. From early 2004 forward, and out of home offices in Monteverde, Costa Rica, and then Granada, Nicaragua, I helped organize and direct the National Education Dialogue to Advance Integrated Health Care: Creating Common Ground…

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Is Weeks going to be a good editor who throws out all the trash that JACM has been publishing on a far too regular basis? Well, the good news, I suppose, is that he cannot possibly be worse than his predecessor. Perhaps we should see for ourselves what the new man thinks and writes. Here is an excerpt from his recent editorial on the question of medical errors in conventional medicine and the role of integrative medicine in this difficult issue:

[A] whole-system solution to medical errors suggests many roles for traditional, alternative, complementary, and integrative approaches and practices. First, better use of these new therapies and provider types expands the tools and strategies for keeping the locus of care out in communities instead of in the problematic hospital environment. One of the commentators at Medscape for instance pointed out that when it comes to “errors” that lead to death, the most significant culprits are the errors individuals make in living the standard U.S. life-style. A starting place in limiting medical deaths is for us to take better care of ourselves. We’ll be less likely to need treatment or to be admitted if we do. The across-the-board engagement by multiple integrative and traditional medicine practitioners with life-style medicine, there are clearly important roles for integrative and traditional practices and practitioners.

More evidence that integrative practice keeps people healthy and out of hospitals would be useful. Our research needs to capture these life-changing outcomes better. The values movement is toward primary care and community medicine. Outpatient care offers a home-field advantage for traditional medical systems and licensed integrative health practitioners, from yoga and massage therapists to acupuncture and Oriental medicine specialists and integrative, chiropractic, and naturopathic doctors. And when people are admitted to hospitals, broader integrative teams need to be available to catch, hold, and treat the whole person and help keep them from being biomedically reduced. Such efforts would be served by research data that measure quadruple-aim outcomes. Think patient experience, enhancing life-style skills, faster healing times, diminished hospital stays, and more pleasure of practitioners in their caregiving. Some have begun gathering these outcomes. We need bushels more. We’ll also have a growing need for reports that delineate processes and obstacles overcome in highly functioning integrative care teams.

The whole-system response to medical deaths is opening minds and doors to integrative practices and to leadership from the integrative community. In one remarkable example, the state of Oregon is seeking to reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with opioids through prioritizing the care of chiropractors, acupuncturists, and massage and yoga therapists. To maximize our effectiveness as agents of change in helping create health in those we serve, more of us need to study up on the emerging language, goals, and methods of the value-based movement, then match up to these aims in our study designs and selections of outcomes. Advancing whole-person care and linking to the emerging values appear to be our best opportunities to help shape the path away from death and toward safety and health.

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Impressed? Me neither!

In my view, this reads like an accumulation of platitudes, wishful thinking and uncritical waffling. The passage that I found positively worrying was this one: More evidence that integrative practice keeps people healthy and out of hospitals would be useful. Our research needs to capture these life-changing outcomes better. The editor of a medical journal should, I think, know that research is not for confirming beliefs but for testing hypotheses. In all this verbose rambling, I really cannot find a good reason why integrative medicine might have a role in reducing medical errors. More worrying still, I cannot find a trace of critical thinking.

As I was writing this, I remembered more about the only personal encounter I had with Weeks years ago. For some reason we talked about THE ‘textbook’ of naturopaths, entitled THE TEXTBOOK OF NATURAL MEDICINE. I remember explaining to Weeks that it contained a lot of factual errors and outright nonsense. He very much disputed my view, seemed to take it personally, and even got quite stroppy. In the end, we agreed to disagree.

Neither this episode nor indeed the editorial are all that important – we will simply have to wait and see how the JACM does under its new editor.