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.