Holistic approaches to treatment of mental health disorders. They allow to involve patient in a treatment. Sometimes integrative medicine leads to lower dose of medications. Integrative medicine for depression and anxiety disorders is effective.

How to use integrative medicine to treat mental health disorders. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Integrative medicine for depression and anxiety. How integrative medicine helps in anxiety? Holistic approach to depression treatment without medications. How to reduce medication dose in anxiety treatment by using mindfulness meditation. Breathing practices in anxiety disorder therapy. Integrative medicine helps the soul to heal. Video interview with top expert in integrative medicine. Medical second opinion ensures that depression and bipolar disorder diagnosis is correct and complete. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Medical second opinion also helps to choose the best holistic natural treatment strategy for depression and bipolar disorder. Seek medical second opinion on depression and bipolar disorder and be confident that your holistic natural treatment is the best. Integrative medicine depression treatment. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Mental health is a huge and ever-growing problem. Mental health is a problem especially in modern society. It is a problem in urban populations. Traditionally pharmaceutical companies approached it in a reductionist way. They attempted to change the imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain. They treat patients with psychoactive chemicals. Sometimes it's very effective. There is plenty of evidence that it has an effect. But sometimes therapy effect was not large. It is less than advertised in the marketing materials. Medication efficacy for mental health problems is less than even some trials. Significant side effects often occurred. Yeah. And also medications change personality of patients in a wholesale way. Integrative medicine can be applied to many mental health diseases. There is a growing experience for that. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Could you please discuss how integrative medicine benefit patients with mental health diseases? What are the methods and examples where Integrative Medicine can be applied? Where it should be applied? Certainly. Dr. Kevin Barrows, MD. Integrative Medicine specialist, Director of Mindfulness Program, UCSF. So that's a good observation - the pharmaceuticals can have a role but we do have to be aware of the real evidence for them. I think some of the negative evidence was hidden in terms of anti-depressants initially, and the side effects. But yes, they can be beneficial, and remember, it is integrative medicine. So I love conventional medicine. It's powerful, it helps patients's lives often. So we want to use it judiciously. We do not want to cause harm or side effects or very high-cost. So bringing in these other therapies is what we do in integrative medicine. I do think integrative medicine is especially useful in mental health. So we were speaking about mindfulness earlier. That's a modality that is very useful for mental health. That probably has the most evidence. It's also nice because it really changes the locus of power. Sometimes I give you an antidepressant and this helps your mood. That's great. It is great! But you are dependent on this pill. You have to take tablets until maybe you can do some psychotherapeutic work perhaps. We don't know. Sometimes you do the mindfulness practice. Then the locus of power changes. The patient assumes more responsibility and has more control. But mental health patient also has to do more work. Sometimes the feeling of depression arises. Sometimes the sadness comes up. Those depressive thoughts come up. Thoughts that lower the mood and lead to feeling of depression. Those thought patterns come up. By practicing mindfulness the patient will see and recognize these patterns. Instead of being unconscious about them, patient will see these depression patterns. Then the patient with depression can exercise choice. "Thinking this way is lowering my mood. So I'm going to choose to think this way instead". So mindfulness comes to mind as number one. Also I would say that Integrative medicine certainly helps in the anxiety disorders. Integrative medicine helps even in other mental health disorders. There's this big component of what patients might just call stress. Maybe we could be more precise. We can call it autonomic imbalance. The sympathetic nervous system is really activated. And the parasympathetic nervous system in relation is sort of under activated. Just rebalancing that is very helpful for a lot of mental health disorders. And there are many therapies in mind-body medicine, integrative medicine, that can help with that. There are some very simple breathing techniques. There is guided imagery, hypnosis. Something I'm proud of integrative medicine. We address the Soul a little bit. So we will check someone's spiritual beliefs. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Do they have a community both socially and spiritually? Also we will check their environment. There are some basic things that actually are very important. Sunlight is important for mood. Getting enough natural sunlight in the morning influences mood. We very much noticed that with seasonal affective disorder - SAD. Sun therapy for that has proven effective. Many studies showed that treatment for SAD is the light. So that affects mood in general for patients, even with unipolar depression. Nutrition, exercise we know helps. So bringing in other things helps. Maybe we still have the pharmaceutical treatment. Or maybe we don't need it with these other therapies. So yeah, I feel integrative medicine has a lot to offer. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Certainly even the opportunity to lower the dose of medications helps. Or shortening the duration of pharmaceutical therapy could be very beneficial. Because a lot of the side effects of psychoactive medications are dose-dependent. Dr. Kevin Barrows, MD. Yeah, that's absolutely true. Sometimes patients come to me. They come to our clinic and their objective is this. "I have hypertension and my cardiologist wants to start a 4th medicine. Because my blood pressure is not controlled. I really don't want to start the fourth medicine." So we'll bring in integrative therapies. Often can avoid adding that medicine #4. Or maybe we can even take away the third medication. And they can get by just on two medicines. Or sometimes lucky we go all the way no medicines. So you're correct, we can decrease dose sometimes. We can reduce the reliance on the pharmaceuticals by using Integrative Medicine approaches. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Integrative medicine for depression and anxiety. How to treat depression and anxiety with mindfulness, guided imagery, breathing?