Part of getting older means having to deal with aches and pains that never plagued us in our youth, as well as more potentially serious ailments. For most people the idea of adding an ever-lengthening list of doctors to our address books, and an ever-widening row of medications to our medicine cabinets, is not appealing. The good news: there are a number of alternative health care options available that can help ease the aging process.

Dr Jessica Hanford, MD, of Northwest Integrative Medicine in Port Orchard, sees a large number of elderly patients in her practice.

“The seniors have been among the most experimental age group,” since she opened her practice in Port Orchard in 1998, said Hanford. “They don’t want to be told that they’re old and they just have to live with it.”

As a practitioner of integrative medicine, Hanford combines the western model of medicine with alternative therapies. She uses medical acupuncture, several manual therapy techniques — Myofascial Release, Craniosacral Therapy, and Biovalent™ Systems manual therapy — and Reiki in treating her patients, often in combination with one another.

“Generally speaking, manual therapies are special techniques to listen for areas of the body that don’t move as well as they should,” explained Hanford. “If an area is ‘stuck,’ chances are it’s not as healthy as it should be and there’s probably pain — and sometimes the pain isn’t in the ‘stuck’ place. Once ‘stuck’ areas are identified I can then intervene in a light way to restore movement and bring the body back to a more normal state.”

Holly Christy, ND, LAc, of Four Winds Natural Medicine in Kingston, sees a wide range of patients in her practice, including older people. Christy practices naturopathic medicine, which focuses on herbs, nutrition, and massage, and is a licensed acupuncturist. Four Winds Natural Medicine also creates its own custom compounds from Chinese herbs, as well as western herbal tinctures.

While she acknowledged that acupuncture can be an effective treatment for ailments frequently suffered by aging adults, such as arthritis, she would not define certain treatments as “age-specific.”

“I can’t say there’s one way we’d treat an older person that we wouldn’t treat a younger or middle-aged person,” said Christy.

Christy did note differences in her practice when compared to conventional medicine that might make a difference for some older patients. The first is that she provides nutritional counseling for all her patients.

“Everything you put in your mouth is medicine,” said Christy.

The second is the fact that the every patient gets highly individualized treatment, and extremely personalized attention. At Four Winds Natural Medicine a new patient exam typically lasts an hour and a half.

Hanford also spends an extended amount of time with each of her patients, normally an hour or more. Getting to know the patient is an important part of her work.

“I expect my patients to tell me all their aches and pains in great detail,” she said. “I write them down, and the next time they come in I ask about them. I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me, ‘It’s okay to say how I feel?’”

Both Christy and Hanford emphasized that alternative health care options are not a substitute for the care of a specialist, such as a cardiologist or oncologist.

“Western medicine is the best medicine for dealing with life-threatening conditions,” said Hanford. “This work is for adding to a therapy for a situation that’s coming under control with medicine or has not reached an acute stage.”

“We are primary care providers,” said Christy. “Any complaint that you would go to see your family doctor for, you would come see us for.”

That being said, both practitioners agreed that naturopathic and other alternative treatments can be beneficial when combined with more conventional treatments for serious illnesses, such as cancer. Christy noted the importance of all doctors and practitioners working together in such cases, to make sure that everyone is aware of the different treatments the patient is receiving.

Although acupuncture, Chinese herbs, and manual therapies still sit pretty firmly on the “alternative treatment” list, one alternative treatment that is currently making headway into the conventional medical world is Anodyne Therapy. Anodyne Therapy is used to treat peripheral neuropathy, a common complication of diabetes. Sufferers of peripheral neuropathy of nerve damage in their feet, legs, and hands as a result of poor blood flow. This serious condition causes pain and sometimes makes amputation necessary. Anodyne Therapy uses a device that delivers infrared energy directly to the afflicted areas, increasing blood flow.

“People had been told that there was no treatment [for peripheral neuropathy],” said Hanford, “but now there is.” Northwest Integrative Medicine offers Anodyne Therapy and Hanford noted that Medicare has recently approved the therapy for coverage.

Finally, patients seeking alternative treatment should remember that, like western medicine, alternative treatments are not a magic, guaranteed cure-all.

“I don’t know if I can help them or not,” said Hanford of new patients who come to her. “But it’s always worth a try. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t need something more, something different.”.