Health and Wellness to offer herbal consultations

By: Thomas Danner

Posted: 10/30/08

Less than two months after the Hopkins Hospital opened a new Integrative Medical Center, the Student Health and Wellness Center (SHWC) has announced plans to offer integrative treatments to Hopkins students starting today.

Traditional medicine originated in China almost 5,000 years ago. That it is sometimes referred to as "alternative medicine" in other countries reflects an inherent bias in Western conceptions of medical treatment, according to Alan Joffe, director of the SHWC.

Integrative medicine refers to the practice of combining Western treatments such as pills and vaccinations with the traditional treatments of the East. It holds that curing a disease means treating the whole patient, not just the patient's illness.

Joffe noted that there was a strong demand among students for more holistic treatments.

"There is clearly a group of students at Hopkins who prefer approaching health from a perspective other than what traditional Western medicine has to offer," he said in an e-mail to the News-Letter. "I want to provide those students with some of those services."

Allegra Hamman, CRNP, clinical herbalist and wellness consultant, will be administering the new services for the SHWC.

Hamman will provide "wellness consultations" to students. In these consultations, Hamman will consider factors such as stress, diet, rest and exercise in their relation to overall health.

"[Alternative medicine] looks at the student's overall picture. It really is a holistic approach," she said. "There are so many things that go into being well, it's not just the absence of disease."

Hamman has been a nurse practitioner at the SHWC since 1995. For several years, she has had an interest in stress management and illness prevention issues. She was responsible for bringing Stressbusters to campus, a group originally founded at Columbia University. Stressbusters trains Hopkins students to provide free back rubs. Hamman also brought the first massage therapist to campus.

Over the past three years, she has studied herbal medicine at the Tai Sophia Institute, where she received her master's degree in June. As part of her studies, Hamman spent a year and a half treating patients using herbal remedies.

Though she is trained as a clinical herbalist, Hamman noted that not all students will choose to use herbs, and that she can offer them other suggestions.

"Some people might say 'I don't really want to use herbs' and might just prefer to work with their diet or go in for massage or yoga, or whatever kinds of options fit best with their interests and issues," she said.

While a visit with Hamman is covered under health insurance, the herbs are not and must be purchased separately. The SHWC does not dispense herbs, but Hamman can direct interested students toward reputable distributors.

Hamman believes that herbs can play an important role in the treatment of disease, a role that is often overshadowed by modern medicines.

"What herbs do is nudge the body into healing itself," she said. "And that's a very different concept than we have for pharmaceuticals."

Hamman felt that her experience as a primary care practitioner will help with her new role.

"From the point of view of the medical community, I function as a bridge," she said. "I can speak the language of herbs, and I can speak the language of medicine. That's an important aspect in making people feel comfortable with it."

Hamman emphasized that she does not see herbal medicine as a replacement for traditional medicine in cases of illness. Rather, she feels the two could work together to provide the patient with the optimal level of care.

Though other college campuses have offered alternative medical treatments, Hamman said she was not aware of any other colleges offering herbal medicine.

"We might be the first," she said.

She stated that the program would benefit students who have used traditional medicine throughout their lives.

"A lot of international students, I think, are interested because herbs are more a way of life for them," Hamman said. "In the U.S., we think of herbs as vaguely suspect or dangerous. In other parts of the world, they are conventional treatments."

Although many are skeptical about the validity of traditional treatments, Hamman argued that we have lots of knowledge about their use.

"Herbalists would say that there's an enormous written record: thousands of years of information about herbal medicines. Traditional use counts for a lot. Just as we know which foods to eat, herbalists know which plants to use," she said.

Aisley Amegashie, a Hopkins freshman, said he feels that the addition of integrative treatments to campus will be beneficial.

"I guess it's nice to have the option there, because some people aren't as big on taking traditional drugs to take care of themselves," he said.

Junior Rick Carrick offered a different opinion. He said he feels that the Health and Wellness Center's decision to offer another dimension of care to students was hasty.

"I think that Health and Wellness has some issues just servicing people with regular medicine," he said. "I think that they should focus on getting people the treatment they need normally before they focus on any sort of essentially fake medicine."

Sophomore Madhavi Gavini was named a Davidson Fellow Laureate in 2007 for her research that combined traditional Indian medicine with modern biology.

Gavini said she felt that as long as the proper use of the herbs was carefully explained and that students did not use them to replace antibiotics, offering traditional treatments will be valuable to students.

"I think that having it in the Student Health center is a good thing," she said. "It exposes more people to it and makes them more aware of the other options or additional supplements for care."