What Is Integrative Medicine?
Integrative Medicine is… Healing oriented Medicine. The World Health Organization defines Health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of infirmity.” Healing is the various processes one might undergo to achieve health. Healing is not curing. Example: You can “cure” high blood pressure by giving a drug to lower blood pressure. Healing implies taking the steps necessary to reduce stress, improve the diet, increase exercise and promote social and spiritual connections. These steps have healing effects beyond the simple reduction of disability and death which results from normalizing blood pressure.
“It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has.” (Sir William Osler, MD).
Integrative Medicine… Emphasizes the central role of the Doctor-Patient Relationship. Understanding the patient as a person, as a whole, is absolutely essential to healing and takes a central position in integrative medicine. Without this, a doctor cannot guide the patient to a position where their responsibility for healing is realized. Integrative medicine changes the focus to healing, a collaborative process between patient and doctor, from “curing” disease wrongfully viewed with the patient as a passive recipient of a treatment. In conventional Medicine, healing occurs outside the patient and is viewed as something that is done to the patient. In integrative medicine, healing occurs within the whole patient and requires the active participation of the patient.
“Patients carry their own Doctor inside. They come to us not knowing that fact. We are at our best when we allow the doctor inside to go to work.” (Albert Schweitzer, MD).
Integrative Medicine… Respects the body’s awesome built-in capacity to heal. For more than 5000 years both Western and Eastern medical doctrine has recognized the innate capacity to heal without any help. Known to the Greeks as “Homeostasis”, they knew what is obvious to most but often been lost as a principle in modern medical circles; that life corrects itself away from discord and illness almost magically given the proper environment and materials. No better definition of the process of healing has ever been expressed. Today we can express this as “Spontaneous Healing.” Some give it the less respectful name “The Placebo Effect.” In all the studies of every treatment or disease ever done a proportion of the people studied recovered “spontaneously” whether they received the treatment or not (the Placebo Effect). This effect has to be “controlled” for in every scientific study or its magic renders the results invalid. You might view what Albert Schweitzer was saying as a call to doctors to respect and utilize this effect. Integrative Medicine strives to do this by reducing barriers to “Spontaneous Healing.”
“The job of the physician is to cure sometimes, heal often, support always” (Hippocrates)
Integrative Medicine… Respects the interacting roles of the mind, body, spirit and community in promoting healing. For an Integrative physician, success is not measured by the absence of disease in the individual, but by his ability to help the patient regain optimum health, prevent disease, and become resilient to the barriers that reduce his health. By definition, all the above factors enter into the process to some degree and remain concerns in the continual process of “healing.” In Integrative medicine, healing — the state of optimum health — is always possible since even with ongoing disease optimum health for that condition can be realized, even if a “cure” is not considered likely.
Integrative Medicine… Seeks to combine the best techniques from our current (Allopathic) establishment medical system with “complementary” and/or “alternative” medicine. Integrative medicine is NOT CAM, or alternative or complementary medicine. In integrative medicine treatment decisions are based on the best science available for the technique, whatever their source, and neither rejects conventional medicine or blindly accepts alternative or complementary practices. Integrative Medicine does not promote the use of non-mainstream treatments over more established treatments but judiciously chooses the best of both, trying to combine them in harmony when this can benefit the individual patient. As with any good practice, focus is placed on choosing the least toxic, most effective, least invasive, and least costly methods in collaboration with the individual.
“We have a three trillion dollar a year medical system waiting at the bottom of a cliff for people to fall off and injure themselves. When we suggest building a fence at the top of the cliff to prevent people from falling off in the first place, the answer from the bottom is, ‘We can’t afford it. Were spending all our Money down here.’” (Robert Elliot, MD).
Integrative Medicine… focuses on Prevention of disease and Optimum Health through lifestyle modification and screening. The largest body of scientific evidence in support of non-mainstream approaches to medical care involves lifestyle changes (diet, exercise, nutrition) that could significantly reduce the epidemic of chronic disease (heart disease, diabetes, cancer etc). When combined with preventive screening techniques from mainstream medicine, there is no doubt that each individual and society would benefit greatly.
Integrative Medicine… Respects the role of the doctor as a teacher. The word “Doctor” is derived from the latin “docere” translated into English means “to teach.” To employ lifestyle modifications the patient must understand what they are and how to begin change. To choose a therapy requires the patient’s consent, something that can only be truly obtained when the patient understands his options.