Of course, the result wouldn’t be much different from what one already encounters in an integrative clinic like Berman’s. If an alternative practitioner is also an M.D. or works in conjunction with one, it’s hard to see what’s being risked. The biggest catch is likely to be that insurance won’t cover most visits, leaving many patients with the difficult choice of paying out of pocket or seeing a covered doctor who doesn’t have much time for them.
Rather than going ballistic when they hear that patients believe themselves to benefit under the care of alternative practitioners, argues the Mayo Clinic’s Victor Montori, doctors ought to be praising, or at the very least tolerating, alternative medicine for the way it plugs gaping holes in modern medicine. “Who cares what the mechanism is?” he says. “The patient will be healthier.”
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