What is Integrative Medicine

When you're ill, it's obviously critical that your doctors and other health care providers treat your physical symptoms and your underlying disease. But you're more than a person with an illness; there are a whole range of physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual and environmental factors that have an influence on your health and on your ability to be treated for and recover from a serious sickness.

Integrative medicine is a way for us to care for you that addresses all of those factors. Taking your specific illness, needs and other conditions in mind, we use integrative medicine to select treatments and therapies from an array of scientific disciplines to heal sickness and help you get — and stay — healthy.

According to The Bravewell Collaborative, the defining principles of integrative medicine are:

• The patient and practitioner are partners in the healing process.
• All factors that influence health, wellness and disease are taken into consideration — including body, mind, spirit and community.
• Providers use all healing sciences to facilitate the body’s innate healing response.
• Effective interventions that are natural and less invasive are used whenever possible.
• Good medicine is based in good science. It is inquiry-driven and open to new paradigms.
• Alongside the concept of treatment, the broader concepts of health promotion and the prevention of illness are paramount.
• The care is personalized to best address the individual’s unique conditions, needs and  circumstances.
• Practitioners of integrative medicine exemplify its principles and commit themselves to self-exploration and self-development.