So what would a true -- and truly effective -- health-care system look like? First and foremost, it would encompass prevention, rather than just treating illness once it occurs. Guarneri emphasizes that screening tests, while important for catching disease early, are often falsely marketed. "Prevention isn't having a mammogram," she says. "Prevention is eating an anti-inflammatory diet rich in greens and whole grains and exercising."

Truly integrating prevention into medical practice will require seismic shifts, including changing the current "fee for service" structure -- wherein insurance companies reimburse doctors for medical treatments, but not for teaching patients about prevention. Medical institutions would need to broaden their focus, too. Along with expanding the curriculum to include the preventive powers of nutrition, exercise, and stress relief, medical schools should foster a greater appreciation for the healing powers inherent in human biology, Weil says. 

"There should be a course on the body's healing system, on all the mechanisms, from DNA on up, by which it can self-diagnose, repair, regenerate, and adapt," he says. "This is real stuff that can be pulled together and taught." At the heart of the National Institutes of Health, Weil envisions a National Institute for Health and Healing, which would fund research on the body's self-healing capacity. 

"It seems odd to me, when you look at the NIH, that there's really nothing there about health; it's all about disease," he explains. "And that's representative of what's off in our whole way of thinking about the body." Health isn't just the absence of illness, says Weil; it's an actively created state.

These ideas may sound like pipe dreams, given the entrenched nature of the current system and the power of the players who benefit from it. But as Michael Lerner, Ph.D., founder of the nonprofit health-education institute Commonweal, puts it, "it's only by focusing on promoting human health that we'll get the kind of health-care system we really need."

Individualized Care
The most critical skill that Brian Berman, M.D., learned in medical school didn't involve a stethoscope or a blood test. The Royal College of Surgeons he attended, in Dublin, emphasized the importance of seeing each patient as a unique human being, rather than as a collection of symptoms. 

"One of my teachers said that if you listen to the patient -- really listen, and not interrupt, like we tend to do every 20 seconds -- they will tell you everything that's going on with them." After returning to the United States and completing a residency, he "felt like a lot of the soul had gone out of medicine."

"Individualization -- what's appropriate for that person at that point in time -- is what integrative medicine is really about," adds Berman, who directs the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Medicine. "Someone may come in with a symptom, say, back pain," he says. "Perhaps as you start to talk with her, you realize she's not satisfied with her job, which is a big predictor of continuing pain. Then you talk further and learn because she hasn't been able to exercise and play with her children, her self-worth has taken a beating, and she's been overeating. And because she's gained weight, she has inflammation within the body that perpetuates that pain." 

Often, when something shows up on an X-ray or other diagnostic test, he says, "it's really the whole person -- mind, body, and spirit -- that is out of balance." Care of the whole person, not just her maladies, is hardly a new idea, he notes, but rather a return to old-fashioned medicine.