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Integrative
Medicine
The
Best of Both Worlds
Integrative
Medicine is the combination of conventional mainstream medicine
and complementary modalities in order to maximize the body's natural
ability to heal itself. Integrative Medicine seeks to create a unique
partnership between the practitioner and the patient to address
healing and wellness on all levels, particularly in relation to
lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, stress, sleep, relationships
and work.
Integrative
Medicine seeks to heal patients in a non-invasive and natural manner,
using dietary supplements, herbs, natural remedies and bodywork.
To generate the body's natural healing processes that have developed
over thousands of years, Integrative Medicine combines conventional
and natural therapy treatments to treat the symptoms and wider causes
of disease.
The
process of Integrative Medicine is to view the patient as a whole
person, which requires consideration of all the factors that influence
health, wellness and disease, including mind, spirit and community
as well as the body. Doctors and patients should neither reject
conventional mainstream medicine nor embrace complementary medicine
uncritically. Good medicine should be grounded in good science and
be open to new paradigms of healing. Indeed, many of these new paradigms
have actually been around for thousands of years.
The
goal of Integrative Medicine is to wherever possible, treat illness
with natural, inexpensive, low-tech and less invasive interventions.
Integrative Medicine focuses on promoting health and preventing
illness as well as treating disease.
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