What Is Integrative Medicine
Integrative medicine is medical care centered on you as an individual, whole person. It accounts for you and your total health. Illness, disease, and chronic pain conditions affect every area of your life—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and environmental. These elements of your life affect you as a whole person and contribute to who you are and what you may experience. Integrative medicine techniques and protocols strive to bring together and address all these levels of a person’s life, as a balance of these can lead to a healthy and meaningful existence.
A Time-Tested and Proven Approach
Integrative medicine is sometimes called non-traditional, complementary, or alternative medicine. It doesn’t try to replace traditional medical care; it strives to integrate other therapies and protocols into it. It complements conventional medical care with additional treatments that are backed by scientific evidence to improve health and promote healing. Integrative medicine practitioners complement conventional medical care with a time-tested and proven approach that emphasizes:
- Your body’s natural ability to heal
- Natural treatments that are less invasive and free of harmful side effects
- A partnership between you and your healthcare team
- The significance of addressing the body, mind, and spirit together
- Science-based and backed therapies
What Are the Benefits of Integrative Treatments?
Integrative therapies can enhance a patient’s treatment and recovery and can be used in conjunction with conventional medical methods. Integrative therapy techniques have shown a proven ability to advance the entire process of treatment and promote a return to vibrant health.
An individualized and integrated approach can also work to help patients overcome habitual, self-defeating behaviors that keep them returning to the same unhealthy subconscious patterns. Then, patients can and begin to take positive steps toward achieving optimal health. Additional benefits of integrative therapies include:
- Lowered blood pressure
- Better quality sleep
- Reduced anxiety levels
- Stress management and reduction
What Are Integrative Treatments?
Integrative therapies aim to create a cohesive and comprehensive treatment plan. They bring together the behavioral, cognitive, and physiological systems within each individual. The word “integrative” suggests that the therapeutic protocols are part of a single, combined approach to healing. An integrative approach to therapy considers the whole person and combines many mainstream therapies with complementary and alternative therapies to provide healing to all areas of one’s life. Integrative medicine therapies may include:
- Acupuncture
- Chiropractic care
- Massage therapy
- Nutrition counseling
- Mind-body counseling
- Mindfulness-based stress reduction
- Movement and exercise classes
- Psychological counseling
- Ayurvedic medicine
- Traditional Chinese Medicine
- Meditative techniques
- Hydrotherapy
- Laser therapies
- Cryotherapy
- And more
Integrative Healing in Action
Integrative practitioners strive to provide relationship-centered care in a calming and healing environment. An inter-professional team of practitioners can combine offerings to address the various aspects of a person. Integrative techniques aid in accessing a patient’s natural capacity for health and healing. This may be an exemplary model for clinical care now and in the future. You owe it to yourself to recover and maintain the vibrant health you deserve. For more information about how you can benefit from integrative medicine, contact an integrative professional in your local area, and schedule a consultation.