Since its earliest days, University of Western States has pioneered a vision of health care that situates the patient in their environment and seeks to heal from within.
As far back as the late Middle Ages, as superstition and primitive practice gave way to more practical and proven methods of patient care, healers understood that wellness depends on a range of factors, including mental, physical, and spiritual health and is influenced by one’s environment. Modern Western medicine has largely forgotten these lessons, focusing instead on treating symptoms of patients. Beginning at the dawn of the last century, however, there have been some institutions focused on an integrated approach to the general wellness of the individual, including finding balance in our physical selves, learning how nature can heal us, and understanding what to eat to prevent illness instead of making it go away.
Since its opening 120 years ago, treating the whole person and not just their symptoms has been the mindset at University of Western States, first in its chiropractic instruction, then naturopathy, and later a range of programs, all of them committed to addressing the patient within their larger world. The concept of whole health isn’t new, but the university has always been at the forefront of the movement.
“Whole health to me is truly that,” says alumna Montserrat Andreys, DC, who runs a community-based practice in Portland. “It’s treating the entirety of the person, their household, the community that they live in as well as the spiritual, emotional and physical self.”
SUBHED: 120 Years of Evolution
As the early doctors of chiropractic moved west along the with Western expansion of the late 1800s, they found remote communities in need of a range of services. In contrast with the rising medical beliefs of the day, commonly called “germ theory,” which held that diseases were caused by germs and needed to be treated with medicines approved by the fledging Food and Drug Administration, the chiropractors of the West were attuned to the physical and environmental realities of their patients.
Drs. John E. and Eva Marsh, founders of University of Western States (originally named the Marsh School and Cure) were building upon the work of chiropractic pioneers back East. One of the leading reasons why the university has been a leader in whole health in Portland is that the Oregon legislature passed the Chiropractic Practice Act in 1915. This allowed chiropractors and naturopaths a “broad scope” of care that included a wider range of treatment than was permitted in most other states. This law served both the residents of the Pacific Northwest, where doctors were rare, as well as the chiropractic and naturopathic practitioners alike as they were able to apply their theories of general wellness to the public at large and pioneer techniques that would later gain broad acceptance.
“Many years ago, there was a lack of primary care physicians,” says University of Western States Board of Trustees member and adjunct professor Leo Romero, DC, “so the chiropractors served a role in OB-GYN work, minor surgery, and primary care.”
Training and intellectual rigor were core elements of the intuition’s operating philosophy from its earliest days. By 1919, the school’s curriculum required 3,400 hours of instruction, 1,000 more than the state required, and what was at that point called Western States College became the first chiropractic college to offer a four-year degree.
By the 1980s, the college had established a reputation for its contributions to the community and its groundbreaking theories of practice. In 1983, the college was awarded a $250,000 grant for a summer program to support Native American students and in 1993, the institution received the first ever federally funded grant awarded to a chiropractic college. The study assessed allopathic and chiropractic approaches to back pain.
This success in the research sphere reflects how University of Western States has long championed an evidence-informed approach, meaning practicing according to research and treatment methods based on results. Stanley Ewald, DC, MPH, associate dean of the College of Chiropractic, describes a “triad of evidence,” which includes evidence found in the literature, the evidence learned from the patients themselves in terms of what has worked for them, and the evidence of the practitioner in their experience of what makes for successful practice.
SUBHED: Serving Portland Where the Need Is Greatest
As a result of providing this range of integrated care, the university’s roots run deep in the city. Seeing how the region and its population have grown and changed over time has allowed the faculty and alumni to understand clearly the needs of the residents and develop means of addressing them. This has led University of Western States to establish and build on a tradition of care within communities where it was needed most. Nowhere is this bond more apparent than in the nationwide community-based clinical education program. Students can provide clinical care where it is needed in a range of setting depending on where they are based across the country.
By providing integrated care to at-risk populations, representatives of University of Western States hope to do more than putting a Band-Aid on systemic problems. One of the groups benefitting most from this program are unhoused veterans. “We’ve also built a really strong relationship with Veterans Affairs,” Dr. Ewald says. “We have quite a few affiliations across the United States so that students can complete their clinical education for six months at those VA locations.”
In the Portland program, a clinician and one or two interns from University of Western States travel to clinics in the area once or twice a week and provide care primarily for uninsured people and underserved populations. The services provided are tailored to the organization. For example, at Cascadia Health’s behavioral health centers, clinicians provide individuals in addiction recovery with training in drug-free pain management. Additionally, the university partners with groups, including Compassion Connect, Community Services Network, and Islamic Social Services of Oregon State that stage pop-up health clinics in houses of worship and community centers and provide a range of services such as chiropractic, dental, and medical care to the uninsured.
SUBHED: The Current State of Whole Health
Martha Kaeser, DC, M.Ed., dean of the College of Chiropractic says, “We recognize all of those who came before us—our history is what makes us—but we also recognize that we need to evolve and change to meet the health care needs of the patient of today.”
This commitment applies not just to the colleges of Chiropractic and Naturopathic but also to the full range of programs at University of Western States, including Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine and Sports Medicine. All share a commitment to an evidenced-informed, student-centered instruction that advances theories of practice based on a whole-health philosophy. The objective is to treat the patient’s mental, physical, and spiritual well-being, and what is taught to the students represents the culmination of decades of research, teaching theory, and practice.
A 2008 Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield Physical Medicine Pilot on Quality study, a one-year pilot program designed to measure patient quality of care, suggests “significant clinical outcomes and health care cost reductions attributable to the use of chiropractic and other physical medicine services.”
The effectiveness of complementary forms of medicine is a leading reason why the philosophy is expected to grow in popularity exponentially over the next decade, and the university is already training the next generation of clinicians to meet this demand.
Marcia Prenguber, ND, FABNO, dean of the College of Naturopathic Medicine, believes the university’s focus on integrated forms of health care and its commitment to serving the community is well-suited to the students the institution attracts, and the university is attentive to those students’ changing needs. This results in graduates who are well-positioned to serve their communities. “You don’t move forward without tuning into what the needs are,” she says, “and I think we’ve done a great job of balancing student needs and the community needs. We’re addressing a patient’s needs, using the least toxic, least harmful approach. We bring them back to health and restore them through the mind, body, and spirit.”
According to Christopher Browne, DC, program director of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine and Doctor of Clinical Nutrition, the objective of a whole health approach is to improve health care, specifically understanding the individual needs and issues that a patient exhibits and crafting a more personalized care plan for everyone. “We look at how can we use nutrition focused interventions to improve the health of human beings; that is the lens through which we view all of the clinical work that we do,” he says.
The integrative approach to health care is on display in the university’s Sports Medicine program, which brings together a wide variety of teaching clinicians and practitioners, including certified athletic trainers, doctors of osteopathic medicine, and doctors of chiropractic. This comprehensive, team-focused approach is appropriate for the field of sports medicine, but it’s also emblematic of the philosophy that guides the colleges and programs at University of Western States today.
Also essential is hands-on experience, a core tenet of a University of Western States education, given that many graduates of the program will be working the sidelines during practice and on game day and assisting in rehabilitation. “For individuals looking to go into the sports medicine field, our program here at University of Western States allows them to gain a deeper understanding of their clinical knowledge and skills than they would develop through their first professional degree,” program director Brent Marshall, Ed.D., says.
SUBHED: University of Western States Looks to the Future
Patrick Battaglia, DC, assistant vice president of Community-Based Clinical Education, sees this tradition of chiropractors playing a growing role as providers of whole person health. “Health care is evolving into a system that’s patient-centered, consumer-oriented, and team-based,” he says. “I think the demand for this type of whole person conservative nondrug type of therapy has never been higher,” he says.
A student or patient who walked through the doors of the Marsh School and Cure at SW 5th and Hall Street would have found a college that looks very different than the University of Western States does today. Yet the foundation of integrated care was already in place as the first graduates of the program fanned out across a frontier where practitioners were almost nonexistent, and the vision of whole health was there from the beginning at an institution that has endured, thrives, and looks to the future.
“It’s because of that group of individuals that have dedicated so many years that now we can look back and say, wow, 120 years,” Dr. Romero says. “It’s an honorable thing to have reached 120 years. I look forward to 120 more.”