Patients most likely to benefit from integrative East-West medicine

Dr Ka-Kit Hui is the Wallis Annenberg Professor in Integrative East-West Medicine, founder and director of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for East-West Medicine, and Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

Can you describe emotional or psychological aspects of those patients in whom integrative East-West medicine could be especially effective?

Ka-Kit Hui, MD: When people have pain, particularly chronic pain, sometimes in an emotionally stressful situation that pain is much more magnified. That’s the reason why, when we try to treat the patient, it is not just about using a pain pill to deal with the pain, but at the same time about really trying to understand why this pain is being perpetuated.

Oftentimes patients get anxious and the pain interferes with their sleep, so it becomes an intertwined type of problem. You cannot say one versus the other, like a chicken-and-egg situation; the pain causes more emotional issues and the emotional issues aggravate the pain.