Integrative Health Care. Aromatherapy as Complementary Alternative Measure (CAM) in Conductive Education

Scientific Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Medicine - Alternative Medicine, , language: English, abstract: Integrative health care encompasses measures and activities that aim to achieve an increase of human health resources and the potential of maintaining and improving human health. The term describes the process of empowering individuals to increase their control over determinants of health and thus to positively impact their health. The focus is hereby not only on an individual¿s behavior, knowledge, and abilities, but also on social, economic, and environmental circumstances. From a holistic perspective, health is defined as physical, psychological, and social wellbeing that is impacted by individual, social, and societal backgrounds. Hence, health is not so much a condition or a goal but rather a resource of daily life.

Due to demographic developments, we experience an increase of the population segment with chronic conditions while at the same time less people are paying into the social security system. Chronically ill people not only suffer from their primary disease but also the associated side effects, as in the case of co- and multi-morbidities. A growing shortage of qualified personnel in the service sector and the obscurity of health care structures complicate the access to qualitatively optimized health care. A transformed social framework, reflected in the abolishment of the intergenerational contract and the rise of single households, signifies an increased need for associated processes around the topic of health in relation to self- and everyday-competence.

Future-oriented health care models should be integrative and personalized in their methodology in order to coach individuals over a lifetime of health decisions assuring compliance as well as life quality in accordance with their individual resources.

The concept of conductive education is a Hungarian method for the treatment of individuals with chronic conditions of the central nervous system and congenital, infectious, or traumatic brain damage. The treatment approach is holistic, person-centered, and integrative. For this reason, it is exemplary for the success of human integrative health care. Conductive education hereby integrates aromatherapy with extracts of the medicinal plant sage into its holistic therapeutic setting.