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 I want to express my gratitude to Blue Shield of California, Kaiser Permanente, Oxford Health Plan and United Health Care for pushing the envelope and making guided imagery available to their members. Blue Shield pioneered a program of sending guided imagery recordings to HMO members when they got pre-approval for surgery. Much to the company’s surprise, this yielded a cost savings among hysterectomy patients of $2003.07 per procedure, not to mention the “customer satisfaction” response – they got multo kudos from all sorts of surgery patients, and none of the expected concerns or objections from their docs. It was a retrospective study, so they had to work backwards to figure it out, but they think the savings was from reduced need for pain medication and fewer complications and doctor visits post-surgery.
Kaiser Permanente – always a leader in the mind-body field – has an awesome initiative that makes free guided imagery downloads available to its members nationwide – imagery for stress, weight loss, insomnia, pain, chemo, radiation, menopause, pregnancy & childbirth and cancer.
United Health Care and Oxford Health Plan give special discount perks to members, so they can avail themselves of our guided imagery at a lower price. There’s a nice write-up of the burgeoning success of these inexpensive, digital interventions by John Weeks on his excellent Integrator Blog if you want more biz details.
I was so taken with the responses we got on the chronic fatigue story we featured last week (some of which are posted), that I went sniffing through the latest data bases to see what new treatments have been established as helpful, now that CFS has (finally) gained legitimate status as a true-blue health condition. Imagine my surprise when I discovered findings showing that graded exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy and, to a lesser extent, certain homeopathic interventions were found helpful. I’ll be posting those studies this week and in the weeks to come. It’s good to see some support for mind-body therapies for this profoundly frustrating syndrome.
OK, take care, be well and enjoy the holiday!
All best,
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Humm, it may now be a true blue health condition but all conditions have a cause. Has anybody done the food elimination diet to determine if symptoms are from food? Bellruth, please be open to this: Food intolerance is a major contributor to many misdiagnosis--including fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.
I know this, first hand. But guess what, two people (an young, new internal med. doctor and another person who had already gone through the discovery process) had mentioned it to me years before another doctor (of osteopathy-who now has his own practice treating such disorders) insisted it was caused by food. I felt insulted and in disbelief when I was when told that my debilitating disease was a food problem. It took ten years of my life!
Over the past five years I have determined which foods were causeing my CFS. For me, the following foods cause my symptoms to return: wheat/glutten, corn, dairy, vinegar (likely the mother which is a mold needed to crete all vinegar), canola oil, and thickeners like starches and gelatin. The symptoms are: depression, muscle/joint pain and weakness (flue-like), constipation, serious brain fog (corn esp.),cognative problems, mood swings-outbursts, irritability and more.
While I have opened the eyes of a number of my doctors, one admitted they need proof and to create proof they would have to make people sick. All were deaf to the food elimination diet being recommended by a medical doctor-they want tests--and tests are not accurate so they lable and treat the symptoms.
Thank you for hearing this.
Sincerely,
Glennis Anderson