Review: Green Hour: “Traditional Medicine and Nature – a complex relationship with great potential” (Prof. Dr. Christian Keßler)

In the historical moment we live in, medical progress and global health care are profoundly disconnected. On the one hand, artificial intelligence and precise genetic engineering technology promise a hyper-individualized, technically brilliant medicine. On the other hand, there is a lack of basic health care options in many regions of the world. Even in economically well-off countries like Germany, healthcare costs are on the rise and the chasm between medical innovation and the availability of more costly and/or new drugs is growing. Critics of an AI-driven medical future fear a profound disconnect where societal inequalities are deepening and the dependency on big-data-driven medical research and practice is growing. As illnesses linked to human-made climate change and biodiversity loss are on the rise, affordable solutions are necessary—not to replace modern science but to complement it. What integrative medicine calls for are randomized studies that integrate aspects such as sleep, nutrition, movement, and stress regulation, and a political willingness to integrate new knowledge from this field into more holistic, medical systems. A more sustainable lifestyle and global development are part and parcel of this transformation process that explicitly calls for a whole bunch of changes including healthier, greener cities, working schedules that allow physical experience in nature, and more openness towards healthy practices from other cultural contexts—integrative everyday strategies based on robust and randomized studies with a large sample size.

Written by Kirsten Twelbeck