Integrative Medicine
The basic principles of integrative medicine are:
- A partnership between patient & practitioner in the healing process.
- Appropriate use of conventional & alternative methods to facilitate the body’s innate healing response.
- Consideration of all factors that influence health, wellness, disease, including mind, spirit, & community as well as body.
- A philosophy that neither rejects conventional medicine nor accepts alternative medicine uncritically.
- Recognition that good medicine should be based in good science, inquiry driven, and open to new paradigms.
- Use of natural, less invasive interventions whenever possible.
- The broader concepts of promotion of health & the prevention of illness as well as treatment of disease.
- Practitioners as models of health & healing, committed to the process of self-exploration & self-development.