Exploring Pathways to Health

Exploring Pathways to Health is intended to provide information about different forms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to patients as well as opportunities for reflection and discussion to discuss how CAM can be integrated into current medical treatments. 

This program is designed for patients looking to supplement traditional medical treatment plans with complementary and alternative medicine. Program participants will be adult patients recruited through doctor’s offices at local hospitals. Primary offices to be recruited out of will be cancer specialists, pain management specialists, and primary care offices to correlate back to the most common reasons patients use CAM.

The goal of Exploring Pathways to Health is to provide patients who are interested in learning more about CAM practices with knowledge, skills, and resources to bring back to their physician so that CAM can be integrated in a safe and effective manner allowing patients the opportunity to explore new pathways to health.  

The objectives for this lesson plan are as follows:

• Through the use of reflection exercises, 75% of participants will identify what they would like to achieve by learning more about or integrating CAM practices into their current medical treatment plan through the use of the action plan cards. 

• Following the presentation, 75% of participants will be able to identify a minimum of 2 key characteristics of CAM through group discussion periods.

• After the presentation, 75% of participants will identify CAM safety concerns and demonstrate how to communicate with providers through group discussion and role-play. 

Lesson Materials

A copy of the strategy presentation can be found here. This presentation includes the introduction, program goal, program objectives, priority population, key health issue, strategy introduction, procedures and methodology, additional resources, and the evaluation component.

A copy of the lesson plan can be found here.

Also, if you would like copies of the handouts for your own use, please feel free to download them and begin discovering your own pathway towards health!

{ CAM Building Blocks     Individual Action Plan     Facilitator Evaluation }

**Please note that in order to view the correct format, please download the files**

Video

A 10 minute sample of the strategy presentation can be found below.

Presentation Reflection

 Overall, I was very pleased with this presentation. It was very fun to share something that has such great meaning to me with a group of people. I found it to be very helpful to have an interactive group. This program is focused on helping individuals decide how CAM can be a part of their treatment plan; therefore, a certain level of motivation and interest is required. At the same time, this was clearly a test audience, so I feel that this program would have taken on new meaning had it been made up of patients who were actually interested in incorporating CAM methods into their current program. I did experience technical difficulties and was not able to use PowerPoint. However, I feel that the lack of technology actually encouraged group interaction and a level of cohesiveness that I found to be very effective for this type of program.