St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center continues its drive to remain a vital medical center and hospital in a changing world. One of the ways this is manifested is through the relationships it creates with its doctors.
Dr. Tom Archie, 37, was hired last fall to work at Wood River Family Medicine in Hailey. But he brought more than his youth to the valley. He brought a knowledge and respect for holistic medicine in combination with his Western allopathic training.
Archie moved to the valley with his wife, Dr. Heidi Woog, a veterinarian who also includes holistic medicine and acupuncture in her practice at the Sun Valley Animal Center, and their son, Holden, 3, from Chester, Calif. Archie is originally from North Carolina. He started work on Jan. 1.
In Chester, a small community in the Sierra Nevada, he worked for a small hospital where he practiced emergency medicine several days a month along with outpatient and inpatient medicine that included acupuncture, modular Chinese herbal prescription, and functional medicine. He studied in the CancerGuides program through the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and the National Cancer Institute, and the Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice course through the Institute for Functional Medicine. He helped sponsor the development of the first edition of the "Textbook of Functional Medicine."
"There are three pillars that form the foundation of my practice of integrative medicine," Archie said. "Western allopathic medicine in the outpatient, inpatient and emergency room settings; meridian-based medical acupuncture with modular Chinese herbal prescription, and functional medicine. Functional medicine is anchored by an examination of the core clinical imbalances that underlie various disease conditions.
"Rather than organizing by finding your way to a diagnosis such as high blood pressure or diabetes, and working backward and applying the same treatment to everybody, this matrix looks back in time before the onset of diagnoses and even before symptoms to environmental factors such as diet, lifestyle, stresses, abuses, and past procedures. We attempt to put into perspective those factors into an explanation about why we've arrived at the current presentation."
In other words, it all matters in functional medicine. As Archie said, there is hope that in the future, traditionally trained doctors will consider the entire patient. The idea is to move to patient-centered care and away from episodic or crisis-based medical care.
Together with Dr. Andrea Girman, an integrative family physician in Ketchum, Archie is attempting to bring integrative medicine to St. Luke's Wood River. According to Archie, the St Luke's Foundation—and subsequently the St. Luke's Wood River Board—looked at the feasibility of providing integrative therapy services in the hospital. That project, he said, started in 2007 and was led by Dr. Andrea Girman and Erin Pfaeffle of St. Luke's Center for Community health. With that pilot project complete, he said, the medical staff, board, administration and foundation are all in consensus that integrative services should be part of the hospital's offerings.
The next step is to create a new position of clinical coordinator and hire for that position, he said.
"What we'll end up with in the hospital is the use in certain situations of acupuncture, massage therapy, healing touch, yoga, and more."
For instance, he said there would likely be a "care channel" in the rooms on which patients can watch classes on guided imagery, relaxation and meditation techniques.
Ultimately, Archie hopes to work closely with his medical and surgical colleagues for the benefit of patients suffering from complex, chronic and, he said, "interesting" medical problems.
Dr. Tom Archie
