Andrew Beebe Interview - The Flip
A Conversation with Dr. Kenneth R. Pelletier
(The complete Flip interview, with only minor edits, not found in the book)
Kenneth R. Pelletier, Ph.D., M.D.(hc) (), is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California School of Medicine (USCF) and the University of Arizona School of Medicine. At Arizona, he is the director of the Corporate Health Improvement Program (CHIP). Also, he is chairman of the American Health Association and is a vice president with Healthtrac, Incorporated. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, studied at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and has published more than three hundred professional journal articles in behavioral medicine, disease management, worksite interventions, and alternative/integrative medicine. At the present time, Kenneth is a medical and business consultant to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Business Group on Health, and numerous major corporations.
Kenneth recalls that his flip into wellness education began in the 1980s when he realized that he was more interested in helping people maintain their health than in fighting disease. “I began to ask myself, ‘Where is there any part of our society, or any part of our scientific world that cares more about health than disease?’ A light bulb came on and I saw that it was the private corporate sector. Corporations were paying huge medical bills, so they should be interested in health. So in 1984 we started engaging fifteen companies to work together in developing programs at work sites to improve health performance, productivity, and cost-effectiveness. That led to, among other things, the ‘Live For Life’ program at IBM, which was the first health promotion/disease management program in any corporation.
“Today, at the Arizona School of Medicine, we’re running the nation’s only training program in integrative medicine. It’s a two-year post-doctoral program for physicians who are between five and ten years into their practices out in the world. They do rotations in clinical practices in herbal medicine, in acupuncture, and mind-body medicine. The objective is to train them to feel comfortable with developing and overseeing a clinical staff to deliver these services to the general population. We also offer a distance-learning program. At any given time, there are 40-50 ‘Distance Learning Fellows’ in various academic medical centers, and I believe there are now about 150-160 graduates of that program.
“Europeans often refer to these practices as ‘complementary,’ and Americans refer to them as ‘alternative.’ Most of us in clinics and research use the term ‘integrative medicine.’ Integrative medicine is, very simply, evidence-based medicine that takes the best from conventional and alternative sources, rather than drawing an artificial line and saying, ‘That’s conventional. That’s alternative. And one is better than the other.’ The integrative practitioner asks, ‘How can we combine these possibilities into the most effective treatment for a person with a specific condition?’
“I can’t think of any major city where these kinds of services are not offered now. In some states or geographic areas it may be more difficult to find, but it’s not absent. There are small and single practices everywhere, as well as major institutions like the Cleveland Clinic or the Mayo Clinic. The demand has been almost entirely consumer driven.”
But Kenneth thinks there’s still a long way to go. “Right now, the United States is one of the most unhealthy nations on the planet. We also happen to be spending the most money per person per year for health care. On all of the World Health Organization benchmarks of a nation’s health – health outcome, infant mortality, average life expectancy, cancer incidents, heart disease incidents – the U.S. is among the lowest of the twenty nations against which we measure all of our other quality of life issues. And we have been declining in that rank steadily since 1960. So, we are spending the most and getting the least amount of health care. Managed care compounded the problem. It didn’t improve care; it just made care more difficult for people to obtain. In the midst of this crisis, you see that consumers are seeking out integrative medicine because they’re not getting the kind of healthcare that they know intuitively they need. The number of individuals accessing integrative medicine for care is climbing exponentially, whereas the number of visits to primary care physicians is either flat or declining.”
Kenneth notes several other forces driving the trend toward wellness education. “Despite all the difficulties, I am profoundly optimistic. Integrative medicine offers a return on investment to the individual, the corporation, and our national economy. Large medical institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic are beginning to realize that there is a health mission – and positive financial opportunity – to offering these kinds of services. Corporate America, being invested in the health of their workers, their dependents, their retirees, is the second driving force. A third is a growing budget and the excellent research outcomes at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. And they’re looking at molecular/biological mechanisms responsible for alternative outcome.
“Another force is that pharmaceutical companies are beginning to invest in teaching mind/body techniques to help people use medications more effectively with fewer side effects. For instance, acupuncture can be used to decrease pain levels so that people taking anti-inflammatory drugs can use smaller doses at a higher effectiveness rate and stay on them longer, if necessary.
“And ultimately it is the government of the United States looking around the world and beginning to ask the questions, ‘How are all these other countries delivering greater health outcomes at a much reduced cost to large populations?’ Nations like Germany, China, India and France have answers that we have not yet implemented in the United States. So there’s a lot to be learned just from looking at worldwide health care delivery systems.”
We asked Kenneth about the role of scientific research into alternative health approaches, including prayer, energy healing, and therapeutic touch. “There’s already some excellent research into those fields,” he reveals, “as well as more funding. The Templeton Foundation is focused entirely on the effects of faith and spirituality on health care, for instance. And I recently took note of a Journal of the American Medical Association study showing that when people restructure their beliefs relative to pain, it induces a restructuring of the central nervous system so that other pathways are developed around the neuronal pathways that fire for pain. Now that’s an extraordinary finding because it demonstrates that consciousness is a fundamental property of biology. It is a precursor and in inextricable interaction with our biology.”
Kenneth left us with a final observation: “I believe that integrative medicine also leads to a broader, richer definition of health. Is a body that is free from disease really the pinnacle of ‘health,’ as traditional medicine might have us believe? Health is not a biological narcissistic – merely having no disease or no cavities. It’s a way of being in the world. Look at the lives of such exemplary individuals as Stephen Hawking and Christopher Reeve. A life well lived and fully expressed is perhaps the ultimate expression of health.”
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The Flip, by Jared Rosen and David Rippe, illuminates a clear path to a vibrant enlightened world where millions of people already live and thrive. It describes in vivid detail and real examples evidence of an upside down world in decay and a Right Side Up world of authentic beings bright with possibility.
The Flip is an owner’s manual for the twenty-first century full of insights, conversations with recognized experts, thought leaders, and visionaries, and actionable exercises and tips you can use to begin your own personal flip.
To read more about The Flip and additional interviews from other luminaries, experts and bestselling authors, please visit
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