What Is Integrative Medicine?

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Curiosity allows healthcare providers to uncover what the initial assessment may have left out.

There are moments during an ordinary patient visit when a simple question can help redirect the work.

If responses challenge initial assumptions, providers need to be willing to change the plan of action.

Imagine a patient who works as a delivery driver. After a couple of months, the patient returns for a follow-up appointment with blood pressure that remains above the goal the physician set. The physician prescribed the appropriate daily medication, covered how to take it, and confirmed understanding. Despite this, the patient reports only taking the medication a few times a week. What the physician doesn’t know is that the medication increases trips to the bathroom and interferes with his tight delivery schedule.

What often happens in these scenarios? The healthcare provider spends the next several minutes of the appointment reiterating why taking the medication as prescribed is important, crucial even, for lowering blood pressure and all the risks associated with not taking it correctly. Before going through that conversation, another question worth asking may have saved both a lot of time: “Can you walk me through what happens on the days you don’t take your medication?” or “How are the days you don’t take medication different from the ones when you take your medication?” The answer can significantly change the conversation and provide the clinician with information tied to a particular issue or set of issues that can be addressed, while just another conversation about why it is important to take the medication as prescribed would have left the problem unaddressed.

Questions like these hold a spark of curiosity that allow the healthcare provider to get into the........

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