A Holistic Approach

The Morrison Center in Murray Hill, Manhattan, for example, seems like a typical doctor’s office at first — but doctors aren’t prescribing pills or ordering surgeries.

Alternative healing clinics like the Morrison Center recommend all-natural healing methods instead of immediately prescribing drugs or issuing medical procedures.

Patients like Blanka Dmoszynska tried massage treatments and finally received a diagnosis after she says her rheumatologist failed to identify why she kept experiencing back and muscle pain.

“The pain is excruciating,” said Dmoszynska. “The guy that gives me massages says that I have tension, and he actually said that I have sciatica.”

And others are interested in alternative medicine because it is a holistic approach and they want to avoid potentially addictive painkillers.

“I would be more prone to take the alternative route first than to take the pharmaceutical route,” said Calvin Anthony. “Because people become dependent upon medication.”

Some people, however, are skeptical about trying alternative medicine because there are no guarantees that it will work. There’s also little science behind the use of the practices, according to studies.

Many people use chiropractic, for example, but the practice is not scientifically validated. It is founded on the incorrect principle that any health problem can be cured with spinal manipulation, according to studies.

Acupuncture and reiki, too, are controversial within the scientific community. Even though there are studies that say reiki works, many say it doesn’t.

“I use modern medicine,” said Nick Whittle. “That’s just what I’ve always done. I just don’t know that there’s the proof that alternative medicine works and that’s probably why I wouldn’t go down that path.”

Despite the skepticism some have, others are increasingly looking for alternative ways to heal. Jorge Sarabia, for instance, tried alternative medicine when an inflammation affected his entire body and he said doctors couldn’t prescribe anything that worked.

“What I did was go online and do my homework to find a real solution for my health problem,” said Sarabia. “Turmeric and lemon after I eat works wonders for me.”

And Katherine Flores, 48, the runner from Manhattan who tried an acupuncturist before her big race, wasn’t willing to turn to alternative healing until it was recommended by a friend and she was desperate to relieve her back pain.

“My close friend was seeing an acupuncturist at the time and was having amazing results,” Flores said. “My race was in a week, and I didn’t feel like it was going to work to go to the doctor. So, I just gave the acupuncturist a shot and it worked.”

The Placebo Effect

Camey Leandro, a former dental hygienist, swears by her chiropractor’s healing abilities.

“I can’t function unless I visit him once a week,” said Leandro, 51, who first started visiting the chiropactor to deal with her neck pains and gastrointestinal problems.

Beyond those patients and practitioners who believe in them, alternative forms of healing have gone more mainstream. Prestigious medical schools like Harvard and Berkeley offer courses in alternative health. Many of these procedures are now covered by insurance, and the IRS allows residents to claim some of these procedures as medical deductibles.

The science backing the effectiveness of crystals, acupuncture and reiki, and still other forms of alternative methods, is limited and controversial.

Chiropractic, for example, is not scientifically validated. It is founded on the incorrect principle that any health problem can be cured with spinal manipulation, according to studies, like this seminal one by scientist and Harvard professor T.J. Kaptchuk.

And even though there are studies that say reiki really works, there are others that that say it doesn’t.

Still, it seems some people who use alternative health don’t care if it’s scientifically validated — they just care that it works.

This African altar at the Sakhu Healing Center is full of offerings to various deities, including the Earth and Ocean gods. The altar stems from ancient African traditions, such as Yoruba, Ifa and West African vodun.

A 2012 study on reiki found improved anxiety levels among hospital patients receiving reiki along with cancer treatment. But patients were also receiving the attention and time of a nurse. That might have initiated the placebo effect, which made them feel they were feeling better.

A 2018 study from the Mayo Clinic concluded that alternative treatments such as massage therapy and acupuncture were an effective treatment for alleviating patient pain — and potentially a replacement for opioids.

Alternative methods that help people must be accepted more positively, Dieppe said.

“It doesn’t matter to me how they work,” he said. “The fact is that millions of people are not wrong. They do help a lot of people.”

But Morrison acknowledges that not all patients will respond to the first set of recommendations. Sometimes it takes a few different tries to figure out which treatment is best, especially if the patient suffers from a chronic issue.

“A patient with a chronic issue might be with me for a year, but I’ve also seen a patient who reminded me it’s been 10 years that we’ve been working together,” he said.

The waiting room at the Morrison Center, an integrative clinic in Midtown Manhattan, where patients will typically come in three times a month.

Integrative Health Education

In general, people looking for new ways to heal are increasingly trying different forms of alternative medicine. 

That expansion in alternative medicine users appears to have led to more interest in integrative health among students and doctors. The American Board of Physician Specialties, for example, offers a board certification in integrative medicine, which began in 2014.

Medical residents at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai also take a monthlong course in integrative health as part of the program.

“We’re developing the educational infrastructure and some of the accreditation process to determine who’s allowed to call themselves an integrated physician,” Schiller said.

Residents at the Icahn School with a particular interest in integrative medicine can take more courses through electives or additional training, Schiller said. The school recently started a fellowship program, which includes a certification in acupuncture for doctors interested in extra training. 

“All of this is brand new,” said Schiller.

Deborah Valentin, a licensed acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist, runs a holistic healing center called Sage Wellness in Lower Manhattan.

When she was in her 20s, Valentin suffered from excruciating back pain. Her father, a doctor, advised her not to take any of the prescription pain medication. That’s when Valentin turned to acupuncture, and the experience was transformative.

Valentin said it “cured the physical pain and also restored a sense of inner peace.”

It also led her to pursue a master’s degree in health science and eastern medicine, studies that were not as widely accepted in the 1990s as they are now.

“I don’t try to convince anyone that it works,” Valentin said. “I rather them find out for themselves.”

Coverage and Costs

Costs vary widely depending on insurance coverage and doctor’s fees. At Mount Sinai’s Institute for Family Health, integrative services are covered by insurance including Medicaid and Medicare. The Institute also has a program where practitioners offer free homeopathy at six designated homeless sites across the city.

These sites include churches, single room occupancy buildings and transitional residences. Services provided range from getting key medication and treatments such as homeopathy to HIV testing, according to their website. At the two churches on the Upper West Side, they offer meals and showers during the week, and it coincides with the medical team’s schedule.

“What’s unique is the Institute of Family Health runs a network of federally qualified health centers so we’re a safety net provider,” Schiller said. “There are people who work in homeless shelters and free clinics. So we see people regardless of their ability to pay.”

On the other hand, the Tia Clinic, which opened in March in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, is membership-based, costing $15 a month or $150 for the year. They accept Aetna, Cigna, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, among other insurance providers. In the future, Tia hopes to expand to Medicaid coverage.

Without insurance, however, treatment costs are high. Members can expect to pay $123 for treatments for infections, such as UTIs, and other disorders, like endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome. Those treatments can cost upwards of $540 for a consultation and labs, according to its website. Non-members pay $425 out-of-pocket for individual naturopathy treatments and $400 for group wellness workshops.

Hospitals and clinics like Tia and the Morrison Center face a struggle to balance accessibility with coverage. Morrison said that at their clinic, it’s up to the doctor to choose what they want to charge. Most insurances don’t cover treatments.

The costs can give integrative health a bad reputation. “The people who charge outrageous amounts for integrative treatments are singled out as what’s wrong with the practice,” said Schiller.

But that doesn’t stop practitioners from trying to make it accessible.

Reiki has been adopted by hospitals and hospices to counter the side effects of debilitating treatments and medications. The Healing Touch Professional Association estimates that more than 30,000 nurses in U.S. hospitals use touch practices, including reiki, as a complementary therapy. 

In a 2015 report, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said that reiki hasn’t been clearly shown to produce beneficial results for health-related purposes and should not serve as a replacement to conventional care methods.

Blue Star’s members say the practice has brought them relief in many ways.

“The discipline of reiki helped me during my healing process, to understand what I was going through, help me quiet my mind, and concentrate on recovering from my illness,” said Mohan Sammy, 55, who has been attending Blue Star for 15 years, while being treated for congestive heart failure and recovering from a heart and kidney transplant. “During that time, I lost my power of speech twice. For years I couldn’t speak. The guidance of Sri Vasudeva and reiki helped me to be the person I am right now and learn to appreciate life,” he said.

Lorick, who leads weekly reiki sessions, received a master’s certification from the Reiki Arts Continuum and International House of Reiki and studied it in Japan and China. “I believe a lot of people need it and access is important. That means being reasonable, but fair with what you charge people,” said Lorick.

Lorick doesn’t charge for classes and instructs attendees to tap into their own healing energy force so they can apply reiki in stressful situations in their day-to-day lives.

“I came to understand that it’s something that’s already inside of me. This energy is already inside of me,” said Vidawattie Barsattee, 54,  who has been a member of Blue Star since the day it was founded.

“Why not use what we already have to take care of ourselves, rather than looking elsewhere?” Barsattee said. “I have found that reiki has helped me mentally, emotionally, and physically and even long distance when I try to connect to someone that is going through a hard time, I’m able to extend that healing energy to them to help calm their mind.”

Velazquez, the sales associate at MedMen, said dozens of people walk into the shop each day just to take a look around. For some prospective customer, shopping for weed in such a stylish atmosphere can feel surreal.

“I don’t know, man,” said Jake Robles, 22, a Bronx resident who visited MedMen on a recent Tuesday. “It just feels over the top.”

Robles does not have a medical marijuana card, which requires a doctor’s authorization to obtain, so he could not purchase products at Medmen.  But he’s among a growing population of people who have turned to marijuana as a form of alternative healing.  Once written off as little more than an illicit substance, cannabis is now heralded by recreational users and medical experts alike for its potential to relieve chronic pain, treat disorders like PTSD and help reduce the side-effects of cancer treatments.

In the U.S., approximately 44 percent of adults reported using marijuana, according to a 2017 poll by Yahoo News and Marist. Thirty-three states now have medical marijuana programs, while 10 have legalized it entirely. Together, the changes have given birth to a booming retail market: North America’s legal cannabis industry was worth an estimated $8.3 billion in 2017, according to New Frontier Data, a leading cannabis market research and data analysis firm, and it’s projected to reach almost $25 billion by 2025.

Still, marijuana’s growing popularity has also raised questions about how to regulate a drug that, in many areas of the country, is still illegal to carry and consume. In New York, cannabis can be obtained through the state’s medical program, which has grown in recent years to cover a wide variety of conditions, from HIV and AIDS to chronic pain. But a push to legalize recreational cannabis has yet to come to fruition, with lawmakers dropping the proposal from the state budget in March amid concerns over how the change would affect minority residents and people already arrested or incarcerated in connection with marijuana offenses.

On top of that, many officials are leery about opening up New York’s market to the kind of corporatization that has characterized the industry in other parts of the country.

“Legalization can follow two routes. In one, corporate cannabis rushes in and seizes a big, new market driven by a single motive: greed,” Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote in a 71-page report produced by the administration’s Task Force on Cannabis Legalization last year. “In another, New Yorkers build their own cannabis industry, led by small businesses and organized to benefit our whole diverse community.”

Some say MedMen already represents the corporate path. Last year, the company announced it would seek to acquire Pharmacann, another major player in the industry and one of New York’s nine other medical marijuana dispensaries, drawing scrutiny from state regulators who fear it might violate state law. MedMen has also been plagued by a series of financial and legal troubles, including a $20 million lawsuit by an early investor group, which charges that senior execs enriched themselves at the expense of shareholders.

Additionally, a class-action lawsuit was filed by a group of employees in California in December, in which they alleged major labor rights violations.

The issues have led some marijuana advocacy organizations to cut ties with the company: in February, the New York Medical Cannabis Industry Association asked MedMen to resign from its membership over allegations that the company’s CEO, Adam Bierman, used racially charged language to refer to a Los Angeles city councilman.

Still, New Yorkers seeking treatment are visiting the store. Robles, who said he’s suffered from anxiety for most of his life, was seeking more information about applying for a medical marijuana card. Figuring out how the state’s medical marijuana system works on his own has been difficult, he said.

“A lot of New Yorkers don’t have the access to get that medical marijuana card or even to get information about it,” he said. “So it’s hard for everyday people who are working 9 to 5, and who have these problems, to get treatment.”