StemCell Therapy

What is integrative medicine?

Integrative medicine is the practice of medicine that focuses on the whole person and makes use of all appropriate therapeutic approaches, healthcare professionals, and disciplines to achieve optimal health and healing.

It combines state-of-the-art, conventional medical treatments with other therapies that are carefully selected and shown to be effective and safe. The goal is to unite the best that conventional medicine has to offer with other healing systems and therapies derived from cultures and ideas both old and new.

Integrative medicine is based upon a model of health and wellness, as opposed to a model of disease. Whenever possible, integrative medicine favors the use of low-tech, low-cost interventions.

The integrative medicine model recognizes the critical role the practitioner-patient relationship plays in a patient's overall healthcare experience, and it seeks to care for the whole person by taking into account the many interrelated physical and nonphysical factors that affect health, wellness, and disease, including the psychosocial and spiritual dimensions of people's lives.

Many people mistakenly use the term integrative medicine interchangeably with the terms complementary medicine and alternative medicine, also known collectively as complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM. While integrative medicine is not synonymous with CAM, CAM therapies do make up an important part of the integrative medicine model.

Because, by its very nature, the components of integrative medicine cannot exist in isolation, CAM practitioners should be willing and able to incorporate the care they provide into the best practices of conventional medicine.

For example, CAM therapies such as acupuncture, yoga, meditation, and guided imagery are increasingly integrated into today's conventional treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other serious illnessesand scientific evidence supports this approach to health and healing.

Coordinating all of the care given to a patient is a cornerstone of the integrative medicine approach. Your primary care physician should work in tandem with such practitioners as your integrative medicine physician, integrative health coach, nutritionist, massage therapist, and acupuncturist.

Developed by experts at Duke Integrative Medicine, part of the Duke University Health System, the Wheel of Health is a guide to integrative medicine and health planning that represents Duke's unique approach to integrative medicine. It illustrates nine key areas of health and wellness and underscores the interrelatedness of body, mind, spirit, and community in the experience of optimum vitality and wellness, as well as in the prevention and treatment of disease.

Read this article:
Integrative medicine - US News

This entry was posted on June 15, 2015 at 8:47 am and is filed under Integrative Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |