Tag Archives: healthy lifestyle

What Is Integrative Medicine

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An increasing percentage of the population is consulting complementary medicine practitioners. Why is this trend happening? Patients are often unsatisfied with what they perceive as a focus on using pharmaceuticals to treat or suppress a specific disease rather than helping them become and remain healthy. Physicians have become so specialized that their traditional role of comprehensive caregiver who focuses on healing and wellness has been neglected. In response to this growing patient dissatisfaction, many university medical centers are developing a new subspecialty of medicine.

Integrative Medicine, which is also called integrated health, combines alternative medicine with evidence-based medicine. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), one of the divisions of the National Institutes of Health, states that there is “emerging evidence that some of the perceived benefits of this approach are real or meaningful.” The practice treats the “whole person,” focuses on wellness and health rather than on treating disease, and emphasizes the patient-physician relationship. All factors that influence health, wellness, and disease are taken into consideration, including mind, spirit, and community, as well as the body. The patient and practitioner are partners in the healing process.

Dr. Steve Bittorf is the founder of Green Bay Integrative Health (GBIH), located at 926 Willard Drive, Suite 236 in the Green Bay area that offers wellness and integrative medicine services for individuals.

In 1994 Dr. Steve obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry and an M.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Medical School, and he subsequently trained at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, where he completed internal medicine residency and fellowships in pulmonary and critical care medicine. Dr. Bittorf began practicing integrative medicine in 2008=, and 2014 he established his practice in Green Bay, Wisconsin The mission at GBIH is to practice integrative medicine and adhere to the highest standard of care. We form collaborative relationships with our patients and combine both traditional and alternative treatment approaches in order to promote wellness. We believe that good medicine is based in good science, inquiry-driven and open to new paradigms. Conventional and alternative effective interventions that are natural and less invasive should be used whenever possible, and the broader concepts of health promotion and the prevention of illness are paramount.

Patients interested in integrative medicine may call the clinic (920) 489-8349 or visit https://www.greenbayintegrativehealth.com/  for more information or to schedule appointments.

Lifestyle Changes: The Best Medicine Your Doctor Is Not Using

Healthy Lifestyle

A 3-part series examining why traditional medicine has failed to promote lifestyle changes as a pathway to preventing disease and mortality. Based on a News & Perspective article published on April 22, 2015, in Medscape Internal Medicine by Christopher Labos, MD CM, MSc. Research Fellow, Division of Cardiology, McGill University Faculty of Medicine; Staff Physician, Groupe Médical Jean-Talon, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Part I – Lifestyle Modifications Are Effective

From ancient times physicians touted the benefit of healthy lifestyles. The Greeks wrote that “If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.” Multiple studies in recent times suggested that successful modification of four lifestyle interventions resulted in nearly 80% reduction in risk for all-cause mortality. The four important factors were regular exercise, healthy diet, not smoking, and maintaining a healthy weight.  The INTERHEART study estimated that modifiable risk factors account for 90% of the population-attributable risk for heart disease in men and 94% of the risk in women.  According to Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center and president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, “A very short list of lifestyle practices has a more massive influence on our medical destinies than anything else in all of medicine. There’s almost nothing in all of medicine that has the vast, consistent, and diverse evidence base.” He remarked that no pill or combination of pills can ever reduce the burden of chronic disease in the way that healthy lifestyle factors can.

If lifestyle practices have such great potential to reduce risks for disease and mortality, why don’t U.S. physicians use lifestyle modification as a primary care tool?

Stay tuned for part 2 – “The Medical Myth that Lifestyle Interventions Are Futile”

Contact Dr. Steve at drsteve@gbih.net with any questions.