The New Normal in Health Care: Integrating the Alternative
Click here to read the full article at Minnesota Monthly.
How Minnesota health systems are bringing holistic treatment models from acupuncture to stress management inside the clinic walls
By Mo Perry, Minnesota Montly
January 15, 2026
Leila Campbell’s gateway to alternative care started with an accident. While training for a race in the early ’90s, she injured her shoulder removing a window air conditioning unit and, on a friend’s nudge, tried a chiropractor. She was skeptical, but one visit fixed her up and enabled her to run the race. Today, her once-fringe detour is becoming mainstream, as Minnesota health systems increasingly offer alternative health modalities alongside conventional care.
Campbell’s early win sent her on a years-long path through chiropractic care, deep-tissue massages, and nutrition tweaks—mostly outside the clinics where her medical chart lived. Again and again, those add-ons helped her function, even when conventional care stalled (like when she suffered a debilitating stretch of chronic fatigue syndrome, which ultimately resolved with the help of an integrative practitioner trained in both Eastern and Western medicine).
“Everything I do, I pay for out of pocket, and it’s expensive,” says Campbell, who is a Bloomington-based retiree. “But if I feel good and I can live life, it’s worth every penny to me.” In many ways, Campbell’s story reflects long-standing patterns in integrative care use. Women are more likely to seek out integrative therapies, according to a 2024 analysis of the National Health Interview Survey, which found that women use chiropractic care, massage, supplements, and other complementary health approaches at significantly higher rates than men. This is partly because the conditions most often treated with integrative care (such as hormonal health, fertility issues, autoimmune conditions, and chronic pain) skew female. Women are also more frequent health care users in general.
Use of alternative medicine has also long slanted toward those with greater resources, who can better shoulder out-of-pocket costs. But now that more health systems are incorporating these approaches, more patients stand to benefit. Insurance can be used to cover services that once might have been out of reach for many. And having conventional and integrative providers connected by a shared system—and electronic health record—leads to less fragmented care and, as a 2025 report in the Journal of Health Care and Prevention suggests, better outcomes.
Defining the Integrative Approach
According to Dr. Michael Mueller, section head for integrative medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, integrative medicine is “a holistic approach to health and wellness that focuses on the whole person—body, mind, and spirit.” It emphasizes a strong partnership between patient and practitioner, and goes beyond treating symptoms to address underlying factors, such as stress, sleep, diet, and lifestyle.
At Mayo Clinic, integrative medicine spans five main areas: hands-on therapies like chiropractic care and massage; mind-body practices such as yoga and mindfulness; traditional systems including Chinese medicine; energy-based treatments like acupuncture and Reiki; and natural approaches involving herbs, supplements, and nutrition support.
These integrative approaches aren’t meant to replace conventional tools such as pharmaceuticals and surgery—depending on the issue, one may be more appropriate than the other. “If you have pneumonia, a collapsed lung, or a broken leg, we absolutely want to provide the powerful, life-sustaining treatments [of conventional medicine],” says Mueller. “But we’re starting to acknowledge that some of the things we use to treat disease may not be the right things to prevent disease, and that’s where integrative medicine and wellness come into play.”
Using meditation to lower cardiovascular risk, adopting an anti-inflammatory diet to manage or reverse chronic conditions, and using mindful movement to improve mental and physical health are all ways that integrative approaches can help to prevent disease.
They can also be used to complement conventional care (for example, using acupuncture and herbal medicine to reduce the side effects of chemotherapy) or to fill gaps in areas where conventional medicine doesn’t have much to offer, such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. “We don’t have a lot in terms of FDA-approved therapies for some of these complex conditions, but by providing integrative therapies, our patients can derive significant benefit,” says Mueller.
Mueller recalls one patient with fibromyalgia whose life was severely limited by pain. He connected the patient with a physical therapist who focuses on mindful movement, or moving in a way that doesn’t worsen pain, and he made referrals to an acupuncturist, massage therapist, exercise specialist, and wellness coach. “The patient did really, really well,” he says. “They were able to start doing some of the things they love, like getting back out on the golf course. They said they felt like they’d gotten their life back.”
Integrative care helped a Hennepin Healthcare patient suffering from plantar fasciitis get back to her daily runs. Over the course of nearly a year, Andrea Ledwidge of Columbia Heights had tried nearly all the conventional treatments on offer, from orthotics to ultrasound-informed physical therapy, but nothing moved the needle—until she tried acupuncture needles. Within five sessions with an acupuncturist at the St. Anthony Hennepin Healthcare clinic, the persistent pain in her left foot vanished. That was seven years ago, and the pain has yet to return.
Stories like this show what’s possible, and why there’s increasing interest in looking past symptoms to identify their underlying drivers. Functional medicine is one integrative approach that focuses on finding and addressing the root cause of health issues. It gives doctors a larger toolkit to mine (going beyond drugs and surgery to include lifestyle and diet modifications, supplements, and mind/body approaches), even for common health conditions.
“We want to address all the things that conventional doctors do, but in longer appointments that allow us to address the whole person,” says Dr. Eric Thompson, who practices integrative, functional, and lifestyle medicine at Allina Health’s Penny George Institute for Health and Healing—the largest embedded integrative health care provider in the country. “If you have high blood pressure, we want to go beyond just giving you a pill and talk about diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management.”
In Minnesota, integrative care moved from the margins into big systems over several decades. Hennepin Healthcare was an early adopter, launching an acupuncture clinic in 1983, adding chiropractic care by 1999 and integrative physical therapy in the mid-2000s. Today, the organization runs a multisite program, with acupuncturists, chiropractors, and integrative health physical therapists spanning six clinic locations.
Mayo Clinic began exploring complementary and alternative medicine in the 1990s. Today, its integrative medicine program offers everything from yoga and acupuncture to resilience training and nutrition counseling, sees thousands of patients each year, and is grounded in clinical research and evidence-based care.
The Penny George Institute for Health and Healing was founded in 2003, offering insured access to acupuncture, massage, nutrition, health coaching, group classes, and more. Other Minnesota systems, including M Health Fairview, HealthPartners/Park Nicollet, Essentia Health, and CentraCare, also offer integrative services ranging from acupuncture and massage to mind/body programs.
Use of many of these modalities has jumped nationally over the past 20 years. According to a 2022 survey by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, between 2002 and 2022 Americans’ use of acupuncture grew from 1% to 2.2%, chiropractic care from 7.4% to 11%, massage therapy from 4.8% to 10.9%, and meditation from 7.5% to 17.3%.
The Benefits of Blending Integrative and Conventional Care
Complementary and alternative approaches to health and wellness span a huge range of disciplines, from homeopathy and herbal medicine to acupuncture and applied kinesiology (which purports to use muscle testing to diagnose underlying health issues)—some more research-backed than others.
The services offered within insurance-based health systems tend to be those with the highest level of evidence supporting them.
“We need to see the evidence [behind a therapy] in order to incorporate it at the Penny George Institute,” says Thompson. This insistence on sticking to evidence-based practices can be reassuring for patients wary of “fringe” or less well-validated approaches. It can also make clinicians more confident in recommending these options.
“Medicine has a way of closing the mind and not allowing you to see that these things may have value,” says Thompson. “But we have randomized, placebo-controlled trials showing that these things have benefit, whether [it be] herbal treatments, supplements, or mind/body techniques.”
Integrating these services into a larger health system can offer the best of both the alternative and conventional medical worlds: “We take insurance, so we’re able to offer integrative services to more people than just those who can afford cash-only providers,” notes Thompson. “And we don’t sell supplements at Penny George. We’re not going to push $500 worth of product on you as you walk out the door—but we will teach you how to buy quality supplements.”
There’s also power in connecting conventional and integrative providers on a single care team. “If an individual self-refers to me for back pain and I notice they have a separate condition, I can refer them to rheumatology or dermatology,” says Dr. Rick Printon, a chiropractor and medical director of the integrative health division at Hennepin Healthcare. “Or I can go back to their primary doctor and say, ‘There might be some systemic arthritis going on here.’ We can talk back and forth through the electronic medical records.”
Mueller notes that people still sometimes assume an “either/or” relationship between conventional and integrative medicine. “But you don’t have to choose between them,” he says. “You can take the best of both worlds to promote holistic well-being.”
This can be particularly beneficial when those worlds are communicating and collaborating. A recent case report series published by Mayo Clinic last August highlighted seven instances in which observations made by massage therapists and acupuncturists—such as swelling, tissue changes, or unusual pain responses—prompted further medical evaluation and diagnosis. The uncovered conditions ranged from cellulitis and pneumonia to melanoma, multiple myeloma, and arterial occlusion. As the authors concluded: “These providers serve as valuable contributors to early detection and care coordination.”
In a medical landscape where patients are increasingly searching for tools and answers outside the doctor’s office—including through direct-to-consumer brands selling everything from weight management drugs to hormones—integrative providers strike an important balance. They offer the personalization and a more flexible toolkit of alternative care, combined with the safeguards of rigorous guidance and monitoring.
“There are some not-so-great players out there not doing the right tests, and not giving the best guidance or care,” says Thompson. An example of a more balanced approach can be found in the menopause care offered at the Penny George Institute. In addition to prescribing hormone replacement therapy, providers work with women on improving their overall hormonal health through diet and lifestyle modifications. Patients also have access to complementary services like acupuncture and group classes where they can connect with other women going through the same transition.
“This is the best merger of how health care can be,” says Thompson. “I’d love to see this in every major health care organization.” It’s a compelling vision, but making it real requires continued action from insurers, health-system leaders, and policymakers.
Funding and Access
The health insurance model is still adapting to the growing use of alternative approaches. For one thing, visits typically take more time. Most visits at the Penny George Institute are scheduled for an hour, but patients are asked to fill out extensive intake forms ahead of time, and providers do a lot of advance preparation to make the most of the appointment window. “The goal is to help all of the body’s systems work together better,” says Thompson. “We need to address everything at once and longer visits help make that happen.”
Insurers are gradually catching up to this way of delivering care. In most systems, integrative consults are billed like other medical visits, with procedure codes added when hands-on therapies (such as acupuncture or chiropractic) are delivered. Coverage, though, is patchy—some plans cover acupuncture and chiropractic, and others don’t; certain “functional” lab tests and supplements are often cash-pay; and telehealth coverage for these services has been in flux.
To keep access equitable, hospital programs lean on a mix of in-network billing, shared medical/group visits, and targeted philanthropy and grants to underwrite classes and specialized clinics. At Hennepin Healthcare, grants and philanthropy support a web of programs, from mind-body classes at the Redleaf Center for Family Healing in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis to statewide mapping of roughly 17,000 integrative providers that provide non-narcotic pain management therapies.
At the Penny George Institute, group classes aim to offer patient-empowering, integrative medicine-based insights at scale. Classes on topics including cognitive health, kidney disease, nutritional psychiatry, diabetes prevention, menopause, and pain management are delivered by teams that include integrative dietitians, exercise physiologists, and health coaches. The group format helps satisfy the demand for functional-medicine guidance, given the limited supply of providers.
Still, barriers remain, particularly for those without generous (and often more expensive) health coverage. As of this year, Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare—the no- and low-cost insurance programs for low-income Minnesotans—will no longer cover adult chiropractic care. “This is devastating for patients who need to be seen but don’t have access to our type of care,” says Printon.
Even for those with more extensive coverage, wait times are long—Thompson noted that the Penny George Institute was booking appointments nearly a year out. “That’s not what we want, but we’re trying to grow and become more accessible. I think the sooner people get an integrative consultation and identify the things that create a healthier self, the better.”
If the waitlists frustrate patients, they also testify to demand that is strong enough to move institutional mountains. “It feels like we’ve been pushing a boulder uphill for so many years, trying to prove that this work makes sense—it’s reasonably priced, safe, and effective,” says Printon. “It feels like the boulder is on top of the hill now, and pretty soon, it’ll be rolling down the other side.”