New Report Chronicles Cost-Effectiveness of Integrative Medicine

In 2012 the most experienced researcher of the costs and benefits of complementary and integrative care stated: “I’m tired of this talk that there is no evidence for cost-effectiveness of complementary and integrative medicine. There is evidence. We need to move onto phase two and look at how transferable these findings are. We can take this evidence and run.”

This was Dr. Patricia Herman, ND, PhD of the Rand Corporation in a Huffington Post interview. In the time since she has been approaching a sprint. Along with Mimi Guarneri, MD, FACC, ABIHM and Erica Oberg, ND, MPH, Dr. Herman now has authored one of the first compilations of cost effectiveness research on integrative health and medicine yet published.

“Contrary to the common critique that there is a lack of evidence,” the authors write in the introductions, “thousands of studies, including randomized controlled trials published in top medical journals demonstrate superior outcomes compared with usual or conventional care.”

The booklet Integrative Health and Medicine: Today’s Answer to Affordable Healthcare: Health Creation Economics was published in March 2015 by the Integrative Health Policy Consortium (IHPC). IHPC represents the professional associations of the complementary and integrative health disciplines whose work is described in this booklet.

Download Report Here

The report is organized around the research results of those prominent integrative therapies. Highlights:

• A 2012 British acupuncture study found that 33% of candidates for total knee replacement who received acupuncture experienced long-term pain relief and were able to avoid surgery two years later, at a cost savings of $8,100 per patient.  In the U.S., where 719,000 knee replacement surgeries were performed in 2010, the savings could total $1.9 billion.
• Naturopathic medicine treatments have been shown to prevent cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome at a cost less than prescribed medication.
• A treatment protocol for colon cancer patients consisting of traditional Asian medical options including acupuncture and vitamins showed a survival rate after five years of 60%-82%, compared to 7%-8% among patients receiving conventional care alone.
• Certified professional and nurse midwives incur far fewer complications and offer equivalent safety records at a fraction of the cost of standard delivery in hospitals.
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