Welcome to Spring & Spruce
I’m delighted to welcome you to Spring & Spruce – a company dedicated to your health and well-being rooted in integrative medicine practices. Our company will have many facets and today I’d like to introduce you more to integrative medicine.
What is Integrative Medicine?
Integrative medicine is where the best of conventional medicine with procedures, medicines and customary therapies come together with the more natural and holistic approaches of complementary medicine to create a wellness directed plan of care for an individual. Dr. Andrew Weil, who I studied under during my fellowship with the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, explains integrative medicine like this on his website: “Integrative medicine is healing-oriented medicine that takes account of the whole person (body, mind, and spirit), including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship and makes use of all appropriate therapies, both conventional and alternative.” If you’d like to read more from Dr. Weil, here’s a link to this portion of his website: What is Integrative Medicine? - Andrew Weil, M.D. (drweil.com)
Most importantly for me, I want to use the best of what I’ve learned in my conventional medical training and experience and that of integrative medicine training to provide a safe, authentic, “feels right” plan for well-being with my patients. After almost a decade of deeply listening to patients as they described what they needed to be well – this is it.
What will Spring & Spruce Integrative Medicine Focus On?
First, the most important pieces of our journey together are what I like to call the ground rules:
1. Safety first; no harm.
2. No Judgement
3. No shame.
4. Confidentiality.
Then we can move on to healing.
Who is right for this type of practice?
If you are motivated to improve your overall health and well-being we are right for you! Occasionally, it you are undergoing particular parts of your conventional medicine plan like a soon to come surgery, chemotherapy or radiation we may need to determine when the right time will be to work together.
I think that most individuals coming for care will fall into one of the following 3 groups:
1. You have some symptoms or don’t feel well and you are looking to find the root cause and heal.
2. You have had some health issues like heart disease, asthma, COPD and you want to minimize worsening of these symptoms and feel the best you can given where you are
3. You are feeling pretty well and want to further enhance your wellbeing and health-span.
What are the parts of whole health and well-being?
Every healer finds ways to categorize total well-being with many science and medical leaders writing about it in the literature. My view has been shaped by my time at Penn and the Weil Center where I did my training, writers and researchers like Viktor Frankl, Bessel van der Kolk and Carol Ryff, among others. Most of all, it has been shaped by listening to patients over many years. For Spring and Spruce, we will consider how overall wellness of mind, body, and spirit can be helped by attention to the following 6 domains, addressing each over time:
1. Nutrition and Intake – from what we eat, what we take in from media, who we spend time with
2. Movement – how we move throughout the day, how it feels
3. Thinking and calm mind – how the brain thinks, rests, solves problems, enjoys that which is around us
4. Body rest and sleep – those practices that make us feel restored, consolidate memories, feel like we are ready to go
5. Connectedness – social connections to our families and friends, our ties to community, how we engage with the other. Connection to nature, to our spiritual side
6. Purpose in Life – that which drives us, fills our cup, makes one feel like life is worth living
Again, I am absolutely thrilled to be beginning this journey with all of you to use both old and new, conventional and holistic, high energy and low energy ways to guide us as we move toward healing as a community.
To your health and well-being,
Dr. Jen
