Healing involves more than undergoing a medical procedure or taking a pill. Increasingly, health care systems like Baptist Health South Florida are offering integrative therapies such as acupuncture, meditation, healthy foods, art therapy and pet therapy to meet the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of their patients.
In this episode, host Jonathan Fialkow, M.D., explores the impacts integrative medicine can bring to patients' well being with expert guests from across Baptist Health.
Guests:
· Beatriz Currier, M.D, medical director of the Cancer Patient Support Center at Miami Cancer Institute.
· Thi Squire, community garden manager with the Grow to Heal Program at Homestead Hospital
· Wally Majors, dog therapy volunteer at Bethesda Hospital East.
Learn more about Miami Cancer Institute's Arts in Medicine program and the Grow2Heal initiative.
Healing involves more than undergoing a medical procedure or taking a pill. Increasingly, health care systems like Baptist Health South Florida are offering integrative therapies such as acupuncture, meditation, healthy foods, art therapy and pet therapy to meet the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of their patients.
In this episode, host Jonathan Fialkow, M.D., explores the impacts integrative medicine can bring to patients' well being with expert guests from across Baptist Health.
Guests:
· Beatriz Currier, M.D, medical director of the Cancer Patient Support Center at Miami Cancer Institute.
· Thi Squire, community garden manager with the Grow to Heal Program at Homestead Hospital
· Wally Majors, dog therapy volunteer at Bethesda Hospital East.
Learn more about Miami Cancer Institute's Arts in Medicine program and the Grow2Heal initiative.
Announcer:
At Baptist Health South Florida, it's our mission to care for you when you're injured or sick and help you stay healthy and fit. Welcome to the Baptist HealthTalk podcast, where our respected experts bring you timely practical health and wellness information to improve your family's quality of life.
Dr. Fialkow:
Welcome Baptist HealthTalk podcast listeners. I’m your host, Dr. Jonathan Fialkow, I am a preventative cardiologist and lipidologist at Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute, where I am also Chief of Cardiology at Baptist Hospital and the Chief Population Health Officer at Baptist Health.
We may associate the concept of ‘healing’ with undergoing a medical procedure or taking medicine. But health care systems like Baptist Health also incorporate so-called integrative therapies, aimed at helping to heal the whole person. People suffering from cancer, chronic pain and other conditions can experience benefits from the use of acupuncture, meditation, music and animal therapy, and more.
We focused on the impacts of integrative therapies in a recent episode of Baptist Health’s Resource Live program, which I had the pleasure to host.
My guests were:
· Beatriz Currier, M.D, medical director of the Cancer Patient Support Center at Miami Cancer Institute.
· Thi Squire, community garden manager with the Grow to Heal Program at Homestead Hospital, and
· Wally Majors, dog therapy volunteer at Bethesda Hospital East.
Let’s hear what they had to say…
Dr. Fialkow:
Beatriz, let's dive into these interesting topics that might seem a little bit outside the spectrum of how we generally provide care to patients, but certainly really important and fascinating, in both their action and benefit. So let's start with talking about arts in medicine. Arts play an integral role in healing and promoting the wellbeing of patients and caregivers and staff in those healthcare settings, how have you seen music, art, reading, dance, whatever the spectrum is, how have you seen these arts improve the health of your patients?
Dr. Currier:
It's had a substantial, positive impact on our patients. And it has been quite transformative in patient experience as well as the quality of life. And we have now engaged over 6,000 patients in the last three months since the program has been launched. And what we have found is that there's significant reduction in not just emotional symptoms, such as anxiety or depression or fear, but also physical symptoms. Their perception of pain significantly reduces as well as nausea while they're undergoing their chemotherapy infusions.
Dr. Fialkow:
It's just fascinating both to come up with the concept and implement it and see the benefits and the outcomes as you're describing. Tell us a little bit of detail about what the programs actually look like. What is that patient experience, are patients selected for it, they choose to participate on their own, how do you identify which arts would be beneficial to a patient, you know, tell a little bit more about it. It just, again, it fascinates me.
Dr. Currier:
So we had brought in seven outstanding professional artists, two that are visual artists and five that are performing artists, predominantly musicians and vocalists. And we have positioned it in such a way throughout the institute that it has become an immersive art experience. And the objective is to engage the patients in the arts, whether it's visual or performing arts. And these artists are positioned in the lobbies, in the waiting areas of the clinic, as well as in the treatment areas in the infusion center. And so patients have the opportunity to engage in any of these arts as they are walking through the building, or if they're in the waiting rooms, they are invited to either actively participate by creating artwork or singing along with the musicians, or they can passively engage. But either way we are serving these patients and they are recording lower levels of anxiety, fear, pain, nausea, and the research has substantiated that. There is now compelling research showing that we can actually reduce blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, by having the patients either passively engage or actively engaged in the arts. Patients can also request an individual consultation if they choose not to engage in the lobby areas. Once they're in the infusion areas, they'll ask the nurses, could I please have an artist or a musician come to my chair-side during my chemotherapy. So to give you an idea, approximately 700 patients are requesting monthly consultations with the artist and over 1500 are participating in the arts in the waiting areas. So it's been a very robust exciting time for us the last three months.
Dr. Fialkow:
So you have subjective findings, which is part of the goal of patient comfort, as you say, objective findings of physiological improvements of things that would other indicate psychological and physical stress. And now you have I'm sure a backlog of people who would benefit from this, and you're trying to keep up the resources to support it. What are the forms of integrative medicine, have you seen, I've been applied in helping patients through their illnesses, the arts program clearly being a highlight, but what else, what other forms have you seen helpful?
Dr. Currier:
We provide acupuncture here, which has probably the strongest bed of literature to support its efficacy in treating cancer related pain, cancer related side effects, such as the dry mouth that may develop in some patients who undergo radiation to the head and neck area, also very effective for treating chemotherapy related nausea, so acupuncture services are here. We also train our patients in meditation mindfulness, which helps us an entire way of symptom complexes throughout their cancer journey. And we also offer an eight week workshop to train our patients, to empower them, to utilize meditation mindfulness. We also have oncology massage therapy. We offer yoga and Tai-Chi three times per week right now, virtually. And we also have a strong exercise, nutrition, and sleep clinic to help target those lifestyle medicine practices that are so important for maintaining our so.
Dr. Fialkow:
So is it fair to say, and certainly correct me if I'm wrong, you have certain services onsite, you're able to provide certain services and education virtually, and then some of it you're training the patient to actually continue with these, with these integrative care models at home on their own? Is that appropriate?
Dr. Currier:
Yes
Dr. Fialkow:
Well, that's again very exciting and very out-of-the-box thinking, and most importantly, you have the outcomes to show the benefit of these initiatives. We'll turn it over to Thi Squire. We can move on to food at this point. Thi, an increasing number of medical studies conclude that a diet rich with fruits and vegetables is key to preventing and managing chronic health conditions, certainly something in the cardiovascular world we deal with as well. So in a sense, food is medicine?
Thi Squire: Absolutely.
Dr. Fialkow:
How does food heal? Give us some examples of your perspective or start with your perspective and then give us some examples about the food as medicine approach towards disease management.
Thi Squire: Well, first and foremost, it's a great tool for preventative health. So if you can prevent the disease or illness to rear its face, then you don't really have a problem, or you don't have as big of a problem. If you can do that with a healthy lifestyle, which starts with the food you consume. So the cleaner, the fresher, the more nutritious the food is, the more benefit you will have in your health and wellness.
Dr. Fialkow:
What do you see as kind of specific types of foods or qualities of foods that might help in terms of, again, both prevention and managing chronic disease? And then we'll talk a little bit about your program at Homestead Hospital.
Thi Squire: Well, first of all, I spent a lot of time debunking the myth that healthy food is extremely expensive or time consuming to prepare. It's about going back to basic skills like life skills and learning those skills and doing some planning, but having access is definitely key, education on the benefits, I mean, all real whole foods have more nutritional value and fruits and vegetables in particular have a lot of anti-inflammatory qualities, which in itself can fend off diseases. And processed foods, heavily processed foods generally does not have any very minimal nutritional value, and more importantly, all of these synthetic ingredients cause inflammation, which then attracts diseases. So very important to be able to make those choices.
Dr. Fialkow:
When we talk about obesity in and of itself, but certainly the kind of foods that tend to lead to a person who starts storing energy, cancer, heart disease, many chronic diseases are tied towards that diet. And when we say, I always tell my patients to shop the outside rims of a supermarket, don't go down the aisles. Cause that's where you're going to find, you know, the freshest, most natural foods, less processed foods to some degree. Is there any thoughts towards that?
Thi Squire: Oh, you couldn't be more spot on. It is really crucial. And I would say also not to get hooked, buy into all of the commercials and the marketing involved with all of those processed foods. Learn to enjoy the beauty and bounty that nature has given us. These things that are healthy for you are also very delicious and joyful.
Dr. Fialkow:
Again, that message resonates for those that listen to our podcasts and other "Resource Lives" again, these are certain things we say. And one of the aspects I always say is that as well as if a food in the box makes a health claim, run away from it, don't eat the food because it's going to tell you to take the healthy.
Thi Squire: And if it contains ingredients that you can't pronounce or sound as if they've been created in a laboratory, even more reason to run from it.
Dr. Fialkow:
Fantastic, well that tell us a little bit about the Grow2Heal program at Homestead Hospital. It's the only hospital-based feeding garden in the state. How do you incorporate the food you grow in your garden with the patients at the hospital?
Thi Squire: Well, we harvest at Homestead on average 5- to 8,000 pounds of produce annually. And I harvest and I take it directly into our kitchen where our chefs incorporates it into all the patient and cafeteria meals, so it's fairly streamlined. I mean, we really can't be providing fresher produce in season to our patients. And also you may not know, but we actually have Grow2Heal gardens at four hospitals within Baptist. It of course started at Homestead Hospital almost seven years ago. And then we started one at West Kendall, South Miami and Doctors Hospital, so, and we hope to expand to other facilities in some form or fashion as well.
Dr. Fialkow:
Phenomenal, are the patients made aware of that? Is it patients and employees first? And is there a designation that these foods were grown at the, you know, the local garden?
Thi Squire: We're working on that, it's complicated and there's lots of layers we're working on it. First and foremost, educating our staff is the key part of the component and really we're educating the community as well. One of the things I do at Grow2Heal is provide field trips for K through 12 students, as well as other communities, parts of the community, garden clubs, or the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, that type of thing. So during those field trips is when we really have an opportunity to make an impact on the future generations and teaching them how to make these better choices and teaching them about what grows locally and how to better be connected to their community.
Dr. Fialkow:
So have you seen other impact by these efforts Homestead in particular, or even at the hospitals, what I mean, it's great it's rewarding and the education process is only going to help both short and long-term to the patients and employees and families, any other areas of impact that you're able to share with us?
Thi Squire: Well, we do a lot of workshops or we did pre COVID in terms of working with a diabetic or patients with a heart disease and that sort of thing to really help get them back on track. So sort of two layers of the education, one is preventative, of course, so you're teaching, you prevented a disease, and then once the patients have actually been diagnosed, then we work very closely to try to give them tools, real tools, to make better choices and change their lives, to make meaningful lifestyle changes.
Dr. Fialkow:
Wonderful, wonderful, well from the arts to food now to animals, Wally, tell us a little bit about how the pet therapy works, what kind of impact do animals have on patients who are admitted to the hospital?
Wally Majors: Well it works from the standpoint that we come to the hospital and there will be a list available of patients that requested a visit from the animal. And we then certainly go into those patient's rooms and spend time with them. But we also take time to just simply walk around the hallways because we found that not only the patients enjoy the company of the dog, but in many cases, the nurses are the ones who are even happier to have that moment of the, that positive distraction. And that ultimately is I think the biggest benefit that not only the patients, but also the staff, the hospital achieve by seeing the dog is that ability to have an opportunity to think about something else other than the challenge they're dealing with for, by being at the hospital. And it's definitely something very magical that happens.
There's an abundance of data that provides a lot of, you know, proof in terms of the objective situations that occur when an animal enters the room, but having had the experiences that we have had in the time that we spend in not only at the hospital, but also visiting some local schools, for example, that have programs for children with autism, for example, or a various disabilities. The impact is very tangible from the standpoint that you have really remarkable interactions with these individuals whereby, you know, you can tell when you walk into a room or what you walk into a classroom where you can tell that, you know, there's just not necessarily a very positive environment from the standpoint that, you know, people are not necessarily happy to be in the hospital, but the minute the animal walks in, you know, it really changes the whole attitude of the people in there and really brings them a little bit of sunshine to the day, albeit maybe for 10, 15 minutes or so. But I can tell you some of the experiences that we've had with my dog Boone at the hospital was just simply been amazing and something that we will cherish for many years
Dr. Fialkow:
Quite frankly, I'm wondering what took so long, you know, as a pet lover a dog lover and certainly personal experiences coming home after a crazy day, and the dogs put the head in your lap and the neurochemicals in the brain start relaxing you, and they've shown it lowers blood pressure. And people with diseases do better at home and people live longer if they have pets, so why not bring that into that hyper acute tense, stressful space. And, you know, through the work you're doing, you're seeing that kind of positive impact on the patients, but the people around it as well. I used to bring my dogs to my clinical office in the past and, you know, they'd always be concern, will people love it? And the patients loved that they would actually ask, can I see him again on a dog day, you know, so hopefully we'll be able to expand your efforts and others as so enlightened.
Dr. Fialkow:
Guys, this has been a great conversation. Integrative medicine -- do you see this as something expanding across the general healthcare system, Beatriz?
Dr. Currier:
Absolutely, I mean, we've seen it over the last 20 years. It's now becoming much more mainstream because they now are having the research built into it to really substantiate its efficacy in certain types of modalities and certain types of disease states. And I think we are now learning that we need to treat the whole patient, not just the disease. And so I really do think this will continue to flourish in the world of conventional medicine.
Dr. Fialkow:
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