 92.7 WOBM with Justin Timberlake on a Tuesday morning. It's a stormy day 8.15, right now 38 degrees and joining us right now from Hackensack Meridian Health. We are joined by Dr. Vivian Caminos, integrative physician for meridian integrative health and medicine. Dr. Thanks for coming in on a soggy Tuesday morning. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for having me. We are talking about integrative health and medicine and everyone's saying, well, what is integrative health and medicine? Tell us a little bit about it. That's a great question. To understand integrative health and medicine in basic terms, let's first talk about what we mean by medicine. So what do we think of when we say medicine? Most of us think of hospitals, surgeries, pills, procedures. And this is the medicine that's commonly what Americans encounter and what is known as conventional medicine. Now anything that is not typically part of conventional medicine falls into the terms complementary and alternative medicine. This medicine includes acupuncture, the use of botanical supplements, lifestyle medicine, mind-body medicine, homeopathy, and more. So in basic terms, integrative medicine combines the best of conventional and complementary and alternative therapies to do what's best for the patient. OK, now what are some great examples of treatments or services that are offered through integrative health and medicine? So integrative medicine in Hackensack Meridian is in a wonderful new setting where patients can come in and get integrative health consults from myself or our nurse practitioners. They can come in and get acupuncture from our wonderful acupuncturers, Judson. They can get integrative nutritional consults with our registered dietician, Nikki. And they can have lifestyle improvement and goal setting with our health coach, Susanna, and our health psychologist, Dr. Sussman. We offer it all. We base our evaluations of our patients on the five pillars of health, resilience, purpose, nutrition, physical activity, and sleep. Now how about when we compare integrative medicine to conventional medicine? What are the differences or benefits there? So most people can benefit from integrative medicine. But when you look at conventional medicine, let's get a little deeper into what conventional medicine does. It's really wonderful at treating acute emergencies like heart attacks, strokes, accidents. But it's not that great at really improving our health. So integrative medicine looks at the root causes of our symptoms and our disease. So if somebody is having a heart attack or stroke, you don't want to go to an integrative medicine center. You want to go to the hospital that has the latest and best in surgery, cardiac catheterization labs. If you're in trauma, you want to go to the emergency room that has the best surgeons. But when you want to heal from our typical chronic diseases and improve your lifestyle, integrative medicine was wonderful. When you look at what is happening to our society in terms of the chronic diseases, these aren't acute events. These are arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome. These are all secondary to our poor lifestyle. And integrative medicine helps by changing our behavior. So integrative keeps me out of the emergency room, having that heart attack. Absolutely, absolutely. Conventional medicine's not great at prevention, but we don't want to throw it out. We want to take, what's the best from conventional medicine and what's evidence proven from complementary and alternative medicine? And together they'll both, they'll be fantastic together. Absolutely fantastic. Now, do we have any events coming up that involve integrative health and medicine with Hackensack Meridian Health? Glad you asked that because February, February is heart month and I'm a cardiologist. I was initially trained as an invasive cardiologist and then now I'm an integrative physician and cardiologist. And we have two great events. They're both free, but we are asking people to register. The first is Tuesday, February 7th, from 1130 to one. And it's called Cooking with Heart, an event that's really dear to me since my yaya taught me how to cook. And here I will discuss heart disease, warning signs, preventive measures. And then we're gonna have a cooking demo and healthy food samples from Fresh Kitchen. And then two weeks later, February 14th, Valentine's Day, I will be talking about resilience and how we can love our stress. So you'll have to come and hear how we can love our stress. Can we love our stress? That's the question I must ask. Absolutely, we can learn, we can learn. All right, well, I definitely will definitely will need to get some notes and cliff notes on that. Excellent. We want to thank you for coming in today. Dr. Vivian Caminos, she is with the integrative physician at Meridian Integrative Health and Medicine. If you want more information, you can go to meridianintegrativemedicine.com or call 732-994-7855. It's gonna be a busy February for you. We look forward to all the good stuff with that. Thank you. Dr. Thak should be in in with us. Thanks.