This week, the Institute of Medicine convened hundreds of physicians, patient advocates, and policymakers in Washington, DC, for the Summit on Integrative Medicine.

Dr, Dean Ornish told the Huffington Post, “Integrative medicine uses the entire armamentarium, both traditional and nontraditional, to give an individual a full array of what they need to maintain and improve their health.”

The overarching objective of integrative medicine is that the patient is the center of care. So what do you do to integrate your health?

This week on DrGreene.com, I’ve shared some of my personal perspectives on my building blocks to integrating my own health: spirituality, food, clothing, and finance. In this last Perspectives post, let me add some additional approaches I believe add life to years and quality to days:

Arts, crafts and creativity. I take time, nearly every day, to call on the right side of the brain to make something. I love to make Artist Trading Cards (ATCs). Sized at 2.5” x 3.5”, like a baseball card, these are mini-collages. Sketch them with pens and watercolors, layer images and words, and let your stream of consciousness drive the design. You can keep them in a folder, display them on a rolodex, or trade them as kids would trading cards. There are scores of ATC trading groups online – another social network channel in which I partake.

Move around. It’s winter on the east coast, so my lovely neighborhood walks on icy patches can sometimes be an extreme sport. The Nintendo Wii has been a great addition to our family’s exercise menu. I’ve especially been enjoying the Wii Fit’s aerobics choices: the Island Lap run is an engaging 11-minutes, along with the advanced (fast) step aerobics module. The balance games and yoga positions, too, help to enhance balance — a key to good health.

Time to share and connect with family and friends. The Wii Fit and Wii Sports games have also become one of our Family Game Night activities, along with traditional board game favorites like Scrabble, Sorry!, and the vintage Careers game that my husband has from his childhood. Too many people don’t make time for these simple activities. But we’re creating lifetime memories doing small things together like this and the fun and laughter add to our sense of family wellbeing. Cooking in the kitchen together, going to movies (yes, at a real cinema), and trips to the museum vary family time beyond sports-themed weekends.

In my last guest post of the week here on DrGreene.com, I’ve shared my personal perspectives on health beyond health “care.” In my role at THINK-Health, that’s my job: to help clients ponder, imagine and ideate new ideas for health and health care. I hope I’ve done the same for you! It’s been a real privilege to share.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines “health” as, “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

WHO published this in the preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization, finalized in 1948. The Organization hasn’t changed the definition since then.

Sixty years later, it’s the right definition. But why hasn’t western society adopted this into public policy? (More on that in tomorrow’s Perspective).

As individuals, we surely understand this. We learn it on our own, sometimes painfully. For me, the importance of integrating the physical, mental and social hit home when my mother, Polly, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease in 1971. Her prognosis was not good; six to twelve months was the outlook at the time.

Polly lived an additional eight years beyond that dire forecast. Along with a partnering internist open to learning about and trying new therapies, clinical knowledge culled from Index Medicus by a close friend who was a librarian, and adopting the advice of Adele Davis’s Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit and Let’s Get Well, Polly integrated one other factor into her life that positively influenced her health: a loving, large, and supportive social network.

Remember, this was the era of off-line social networks; she didn’t have access to this online world of reaching out to People Like Her.

Polly benefited from a buoyant social network: a loving husband, three daughters, countless friends, workmates in her school, colleagues long-valued from leading her town’s Salk vaccine field committee, and nine older brothers and sisters and their families. All of these supporters rallied around her, surrounding her with abundant love, laughs, faith and affection.

Since she died in 1979, I’ve consumed innumerable books, peer-reviewed journal articles, and blogs that connect the dots between social networks, spirituality, and health. From Bernie Siegel’s stories to Kitchen Table Wisdom, I know first-hand the healing power of love, faith, and bountiful hugs.

Whether off-line or on-, social networks buoy the spirit and, in doing so, help us reach WHO’s integrative realization of whole health.

On February 24, 2009, President Obama told the Congress, “The state of our economy is a concern that rises above all others. And rightly so….You don’t need to hear another list of statistics to know that our economy is in crisis, because you live it every day. It’s the worry you wake up with and the source of sleepless nights….The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere.”

The recession is impacting our citizens’ health. Health is defined by a wide range of factors, according to the Edelman Health Engagement Barometer. According to Edelman’s survey, the top four issues that impact health among Health Info-entials (the most information-seeking health citizens) are:

1. Physical health
2. Mental health
3. Personal appearance
4. Financial health.

Thus, fiscal health drives physical health.

On the purely money front, it’s interesting to note that Americans’ online search behavior demonstrates their fiscal angst. comScore’s latest data show that between December 2007 and 2008, there were big increases in searches using the terms, “unemployment,” “unemployment benefits,” “bankruptcy,” and “coupons.”

Americans are learning how to be better value-based health shoppers – whether they are conscious of this behavior or not. One of the few profitable companies operating today is Medco Health, the pharmacy benefits manager, which reported a bullish outlook today. Medco’s core business is mail-order pharmacy – generally moving generic drugs from distributors to consumers.

Adopting generics is one strategy that Americans have been using to manage out-of-pocket health costs. Finding coupons to help defray the cost of expensive branded drugs is another tactic that helps many patients.

But in this recession, some Americans are rationing care in the immediate term that may lead to longer-term poor health outcomes. One in four Americans says she had trouble paying for health care and health insurance as a result of the economic downturn.

Some of the self-rationing tactics that people are undertaking during this recession include putting off visits to physicians when people feel truly ill, skipping doses of drugs and not filling prescriptions, and skipping a recommended medical test or procedure.

Health citizens should take the long-view when making fiscal decisions about their health, and the health of those for whom they care. Health and wealth are intimately linked: without the former, the latter isn’t worth a dime.

In and beyond the U.S., there’s a global trend that “health care” is morphing toward health. In the U.S., this is a critical turn for the better given that health care consumes 17 cents of every dollar spent in America. As a health economist, I’m very concerned about the rate of growth in health spending in the U.S. than other components of the economy. Americans have become value-oriented shoppers in the past few years – more so during this economic downturn. Note that, in 2008, the only two stocks in the Dow Jones Index that increased in value were Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.

We haven’t been good value-oriented shoppers when it comes to health. But there’s one area where we can make an immediate, healthful and positive economic contribution to health in this country: by being better food consumers.

In today’s Perspectives column on DrGreene.com, I’m thinking about the impact of food on health. We don’t include food purchases in the health care component of the GDP; perhaps we should. But only the good stuff; if you think of the Mediterranean Diet, then you’ll have an idea of the market basket of foodstuffs I’d put into health-ful spending. The stuff that contributes toward diabesity should go into the market basket for ill health.

I’ve been a member of the Slow Food movement for many years. Slow Food started in Italy, Mecca for many of my favorite things: the art of Botticelli, Big Tuscan Wines, handmade marble papers, and, yes, Mrs. Greene, slow-cooked food. The goal of Slow Food is to counter the fast food-fast life and bring back local food: that is, the locavore life. The idea is to think about what we eat and how these choices impact the world around us: our local community, our global community.

One fellow who’s been thinking a lot about this is Mark Bittman, who writes the “Bitten” column in the New York Times. I’ve been a fan of his since he wrote his book, How to Cook Everything. His newest book begins where Michael Pollan ended after In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma

The book is Food Matters. In this wonderful tome, Bittman connects the dots between global warming and the environment, obesity, overconsumption, and overly-junky food.

Bittman’s personal story is that, after adopting a Pollan-like foodstyle 2 years ago, he dropped 35 pounds, lowered his cholesterol and is better managing blood glucose levels. He also decreased the size of his carbon footprint.

I highly recommend this book. It’s a passionate combination of political treatise and practical cookbook. Food Matters now holds a prize spot with my other favorite foodie books, including the classic (and very dog-eared) Moosewood Cookbook, the Silver Palate original cookbook, and Lidia’s Italy.

Buon appetito! And remember – Slow Food is good for your health, and the health of the planet.

Some background on JSK: Thanks to Cheryl Greene, I’ll be sharing some personal perspectives on health this week with you here on DrGreene.com. I’d already felt a part of the Dr. Greene family due to my own use of the portal back in the mid-1990s after becoming a new mother with countless questions about what-to-do-with-a-new-baby. So this invitation to share here was most welcome! My professional lens is as a health economist with THINK-Health, and I daily blog at Health Populi. I’ve worked at the intersection of health and technology for over two decades. My own belief is that about one-half of health is nature and one-half, nurture.

In that vein, I will be sharing with you each of the five days this week some thoughts on how we can advance health each day, 24×7, beyond consuming health ‘care.’

Today, my thoughts are on not vitamins or food or meditation or exercise, but on…clothing.

Since it’s Monday, it means I spent a portion of yesterday doing one of my favorite things that enhances my health and wellbeing: reading the Sunday New York Times. And if it’s Sunday, I prefer the good old-fashioned paper version, not the online one, accompanied by many large cups of Republic of Tea’s kiwi pear green tea.

This week’s paper included a full-color, “T Magazine,” the Women’s Fashion Spring 2009 section. As I perused `each page, wondering who this spring will spend their scarce dollars on such frippery, a most welcome and knowing full-page ad allowed me to exhale before I moved the magazine to the recycle pile: it was from my beloved clothing brand, Eileen Fisher.

I wear this clothing brand as part of my daily healthy lifestyle. If you doubt my sincerity, note the company’s mission statement: “To inspire women to celebrate who they are….To create products that simplify life and nurture the spirit….To work as a reflection of how our clothing works: simply, and in connection; individual growth and well-being; collaboration and teamwork.”

Now, that’s a healthier mission statement than I’ve seen reading many hospitals’ strategic plans.

There is something about donning clothes made from natural materials in styles that let you breathe and, by the way, flatter everyone who puts them on. Furthermore, the company has added more green fabrics to the line, in hemp and organic cotton, among other fibers.

Recently, Bloomingdale’s VP for fashion direction, Stephanie Solomon, told More magazine, “In a hectic society, there is something calming and Zen-like about these clothes.”

The next time you come across an Eileen Fisher store or department, go try on a pair of the label’s magical stretch crepe trousers and tell me if that experience doesn’t make you just say, “Ommmmm.”

Until tomorrow, I hope the clothes you’re wearing today make you feel as good as my EF outfit does.