What Is Integrative Medicine?

Integrative Medicine is a common and often misunderstood concept. Integrative Medicine is not a specialty, but a healthcare strategy that takes into consideration the many unique facets that contribute to health and utilizes either a specific strategy or multiple strategies from many disciplines to treat the patient. Many people mistake Integrative Medicine only as alternative medicine. The fact is that Integrative Medicine can be related to Alternative Medicine, traditional Allopathic Medicine, or the combination of both Alternative and Allopathic Medicine approaches. The key to Integrative medicine is an approach to treating a patient while putting them at the center and employing a personalized approach to treating the cause or the many causes to their disease. There are many facets such as emotional, physical, social, mental, spiritual, and environmental factors that influence our health every day. These factors can promote health and eliminate disease or these factors can create disease and destroy your health. In integrative Medicine, often many physicians are collaborating at the same time on the evaluation, medical decision making, and treatment on behalf of the patient. Working together with different specialists to ask the right questions, come up with the appropriate diagnostic work up, and outline a unique and customized treatment plan is exactly what integrative medicine seeks to achieve. This process and practice has become very apparent in the medical field today from the fields of Integrative Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Rheumatology, Nursing, Oncology, and just about every other medical specialty.