What is Intentional Integrity Medicine?
Intentional (adj): done on purpose, deliberate
Integrity (n): a state of being whole, undivided
Your pain can be the result of an acute trauma, an overuse injury, or in many cases, a natural process (such as arthritis). In any case, healing has occurred incompletely and integrity has been lost. There are several reasons why this may have occurred. In today’s world who has time to heal? Time is money and rest is a time wasting event. With your current commitments, work schedule, the introduction of year round youth travel teams and college courses before college, who has time to heal? And yet healing is the best form of pain relief.
What is the first thing you reach for at the time of injury or when you feel pain? In most cases the answer is an anti-inflammatory. This could be in the form of aspirin or an NSAID (ibuprofen). You take these medications with a hope that this will allow you to resume your activity quickly without experiencing downtime, time off work or missing a game. However, the quick return to activity, or diminished pain, does not suggest complete healing of an injury. By taking the medication, the intent was a quick return to activity without any thought to a return to integrity (a state of being whole). In many cases the pain is blunted and so is the healing cascade. Incomplete, incompetent, and insufficient healing has occurred setting you up for instability, repetitive injury and/or chronic pain. When this happens you have limited options, which results in the majority of people accepting the belief they are destined to live with pain. In desperation, when help is sought, the common physician response is “come back when you’re ready for surgery” or “have you tried the latest medication”.
Unfortunately medication will not heal or change your pain, but may change your perception of pain such that it becomes livable, yet nothing has been done to heal or change the integrity of the original injury.
Although medication is commonly accepted, it is nothing more than a bandage, used to cover the wound in hopes it will just go away. This is often times a useful strategy depending of your stage of life. But what if your pain could be healed naturally without medication or surgery? Your pain is more than likely the result of unintentional circumstances. Something that, if you had the knowledge, you would have not have chosen the outcome. Thus, healing must be equal to the original injury. Healing must be achieved through intention. Unintentional living got you where you are, and it will take focused intention to get you out. The goal of focused intention is to reinstate life with less pain and improved function or INTENTIONAL INTEGRITY. The mission of Intentional Integrity is the restoration of health and the improvement of function. It may have been fun, easy and thoughtless to get you where you are, but will take a plan to get you where you want to be.
Intentional Integrity does not negate the simple truth that healing remains intuitive. However, it does imply that healing can be planned and induced.
It is possible, via your body’s built-in ability to achieve integrity, to stimulate a healing response, naturally. This can be accomplished by multiple techniques generally referred to as regenerative medicine.
In a nutshell, regenerative medicine stimulates the body’s intuitive repair process, it basically reminds the body that there is a reason for pain or dysfunction and then provides a repair mechanism. This is done by intentionally placing growth factors and proteins responsible for repair in the area of dysfunction. In most cases this can be achieved by an injection. The material injected will depend on the extent and location of injury and can consist of specific components of your blood obtained through a simple blood draw or in some cases, bone marrow or fat aspiration. All of which can easily be performed in the office.
The goal of these practices are to decrease pain, and improve function, which can be achieved with a correct diagnosis and treatment plan. This plan will often require osteopathic manipulation and physical therapy to achieve desired results. It will also require pin-point accuracy in diagnosis for optimal outcomes. This is achieved by using ultrasound guidance to insure that the injured tissue is isolated and treated.