By KA-KIT HUI

ANITA De Franz has dedicated her life to sports and to the Olympics. She was team captain and won a bronze medal for rowing at the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976. In 1986 she was elected member of the International Olympic Committee and in 1996 she became the IOC’s first female vice president. She is currently president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation in Los Angeles, California, the site of the 1984 Olympics in which China first participated after many years of absence from the Games.

“I had been athletic all my life. When I began to suffer extreme back pain, I was delighted to be introduced to the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine,” De Frantz stated. “Eastern Medicine utilizes a powerful understanding of the interconnectedness of the body. The Center enables each individual to become responsible for his or her own health. My hope is that the methods of the Center for East-West Medicine can be employed to enhance the health of all.”

From the vantage point of my three decades of experience as a UCLA-trained internist, clinical pharmacologist and geriatrician, it was clear to me that Western medicine alone was inadequate as a healthcare model. My experience in Chinese medicine raised the possibility of an exciting new approach: integrative East-West Medicine. I established the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine in 1993 to demonstrate a potential solution to the looming healthcare crisis.

All forms of medicine aim to ease human suffering and improve quality of life; they differ only in their approaches to the realization of this goal. The blending of the Eastern and Western approaches to health and healing can maximize the safety and effectiveness of care in an accessible and affordable manner.

We build upon the strengths of both systems to create a new model of comprehensive care with emphasis on health promotion, disease prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation through an integrated practice of East-West Medicine. Our goal is to develop a model system of healthcare that will benefit people all over the world.

Most patients are referred to the Center after failing to respond to Western medical treatments, including surgeries and potent medications, which oftentimes induce unintended consequences. Patients at the center suffer from a variety of illnesses, primarily chronic pain such as back and neck pain, headaches, fibromyalgia, sports and work-related injuries, and cancer-related symptoms.

Western medicine has made great advances in treating infectious disease and acute trauma but has been less successful against chronic disease. On the other hand, Chinese Medicine has been found to be effective in many chronic illnesses. Using Western approaches for such critical occurrences as heart attacks or injuries, for example, and Eastern methods for wellness and prevention focusing on the interconnectedness of the body, mind and spirit offers an innovative, flexible, less invasive, and less costly approach to health and disease.

The Center Clinic is frequently the clinic of last resort. We are able to solve some of the problems that defy the best of Western medicine because we do not just treat a problem or a disease, we treat a person with ill-health, someone who is out of balance and has decreased functional reserve. We also teach the patient self-care and ways to promote self-healing. The Center’s excellent reputation has attracted patient referrals from physicians from not only within the UCLA Health system---the best in the Western United States---but also from all over the nation.

Since the Center’s establishment, it has emphasized education, both within the U.S. and internationally. It holds conferences annually, either in China or the United States. Training the next generation of physicians is critical to our mission. We offer courses to UCLA’s medical students and rotations for physicians in training. We also offer a two-year Fellowship for MDs interested in becoming leaders in integrative East-West Medicine. Our Fellows received their specialty training at some of the most prestigious medical centers, including UCLA, Yale and Johns Hopkins. In the future, these physicians will share their experience, work with and learn from their counterparts in China and other countries.

Over the past decade, learning from and sharing with our colleagues in China has continued to improve this healthcare model based on blending the best of the two most widely used healing traditions in the world. I was honored to deliver the concluding remarks at the highly successful Second World Congress on Integrative Medicine in Beijing in 2002. My good friend Professor Ke-Ji Chen, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and President of the Chinese Association of Integrative Medicine, chaired the Congress.

In my remarks, I stated my belief that with good medicine, rigorous science, rational policy, effective communication, and collaborating with and learning from each other, we can become a vital force to transform the current healthcare system. It is important that we form a worldwide collaboration for positive transformation.

Professor Chen agrees. “We are brothers in arms. We will collaborate forever.”

KA-KIT HUI is a professor and director of the Center for East-West Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles.