What Is Integrative Care?

Integrative Healthcare is an approach to care that seeks to integrate the best of Western scientific medicine with a broader understanding of the nature of illness, healing, and wellness. Easily incorporated by all medical specialties and professional disciplines, and by all health care systems, its use not only improves care for patients, it also enhances the cost-effectiveness of health care delivery for providers and payors.

A practical strategy, integrative medicine puts the patient at the center of the care and addresses the full range of physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual and environmental influences that affect a person’s health. Treating the whole person addresses both the patient’s immediate needs as well as the effects of the long-term and complex interplay between a range of biological, behavioral, psychosocial and environmental influences are addressed. This process enhances the ability of individuals to not only get well, but most importantly, to stay well.

Integrative medicine seeks to restore and maintain health and wellness across a person’s lifespan by understanding the patient’s unique set of circumstances and addressing the full range of health. Through personalizing care, integrative medicine goes beyond the treatment of symptoms to address all the causes of an illness. In doing so, the patient’s immediate health needs as well as the effects of the long-term and complex interplay between biological, behavioral, psychosocial and environmental influences are taken into account.”

Alive Integrative Medicine’s model of integrative care emphasizes the client’s control of experience. Before any discussion involving client information between clinicians occurs, the client is given the option to consent to integrative treatment. If the client wishes for clinicians to operate independently, then their patient information remains confidential to each clinician, respectively.  However, if the client agrees to integrative care, then they remain fully informed of all communications between clinicians. Clinicians and patient will continue operating as a team to develop the best integrative healthcare plan that makes you feel most alive! 

Resources: 
What is Integrative Medicine? (n.d.). Retrieved  from https://www.dukeintegrativemedicine.org/about/what-is-integrative-medicine/