Many organizations offer mission statements that nattily sum up their corporate vision without much substance to back it. But Dr. Mary Ann Wallace, medical director of the division of integrative medicine for Samaritan Health Services, takes their mission statement more than a little seriously.

"Integrative" medicine relates to a holistic, multi-tiered approach to medicine that involves both conventional treatments and emerging approaches, including naturopathy and homeopathy.

"Everyone who has ever been hired has been hired through the filter of the vision statement," Wallace said. "That's an important part of our well-being, making sure the personalities are harmonious."

Demand for holistic health care has been growing dramatically since the clinic first opened seven years ago. That demand is what allowed Heartspring to move into its new facility, and add eight more providers to the staff.

"The growth has been enormous," Wallace said.

Samaritan Heartspring Wellness Clinic has been sharing space with the mental health portion of Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center since 2001. But this week, the clinic opened the doors of its new building on Circle Boulevard. Boxes still are being unpacked and new employees are settling in, but patients were already meeting with physicians, receiving massages or scheduling counseling sessions.

"The physicians were hired explicitly because they tend to take a holistic view of healthcare and the human beings to come to them as patients," Wallace said. "If a person comes here as a patient, they can expect that they will be asked questions that go a little bit deeper, that review their lifestyle and attitudes about health and well-being. There's a lot of interest in the mind-body connection, looking at how emotions and attitudes influence health and influence behaviors that then influence health."

The clinic is staffed with 18 providers who offer everything from general family medicine to counseling, osteopathic and naturopathic services, as well as acupuncture, Feldenkrais (a method of working with the awareness of the body to improve movement and function) and a variety of other services. All are aimed at holistic health care for the mind and body.

"The idea of the combination of all these therapies is that in order to really access all the different parts that go into well-being, sometimes we have to explore more deeply our psyche, mental well-being, and the mind and body are not separate," Wallace said. "We do not espouse the idea that pain is all in the mind, but we recognize that the mind has something to do with the body's experience."

Heartspring has a sister clinic in Albany, and both are focused on cooperation and interchange of ideas, Wallace said. Even the flow of the building has been designed so that providers are constantly consulting with other specialists to offer patients a range of expertise.

"We know when we're seeing a client that we're not alone in our treatment," she said, "and someone else who might have a particular skill set would serve to help bring balance to this person's life in a way by ourselves we can't, because we can't have all the training that's possible."

Not all of Heartspring's services are covered by many mainstream insurance providers, Wallace said, so Heartspring has chosen to work with seven conventional insurance providers that cover a higher percentage of their services. But office staff work with patients who do not fall under that umbrella of coverage to either arrange a payment plan or find ways to work with their insurance providers so that at least some of their treatments can be covered.

To show off its many amenities, Corvallis Heartspring Wellness Center will hold an open house from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Nov. 14 at 990 N.W. Circle Boulevard, Suite 1. To find out more about classes offered and services provided, go to www.samhealth.org.