What is Integrative Medicine?
Integrative Medicine is patient centered, healing oriented, and embraces conventional and complementary therapies. It represents a broader paradigm of medicine than the dominant biomedical model. It was driven initially by consumer demand and is now increasingly accepted by health care providers and institutions. Integrative Medicine reaffirms the importance of the therapeutic relationship, a focus on the whole person and lifestyle, a renewed attention to healing and a willingness to use all appropriate therapeutic approaches whether they originate in conventional or alternative medicine.
What is Functional Medicine?
The term “functional medicine” was coined in 1993 to describe the medicine of the future. In fact, today, many complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, practitioners use a functional medicine approach that includes the following:
Personal uniqueness: Each individual is unique. This uniqueness encompasses voluntary activities, such as decision-making, personality development, and emotional response, and involuntary activities like metabolism of nutrients, cellular processing of information, and communication among the body’s organ systems. Functional medicine professionals realize that all individuals have unique metabolic patterns that affect their health needs and thus, the concept of individuality is central to every aspect of functional medicine, from clinical assessment and diagnosis to the broad spectrum of treatment modalities.
Relationship-centered approach: Functional medicine practitioners use a relationship-centered approach to support wellness. This means that in addition to considering the overall health of the person, functional medicine practitioners consider the beliefs, attitudes, and motivations, as well as the physical, mental, and emotional aspects, of the individual.
Preventive care: Optimal health is not just the absence of disease. Even the most minor symptoms can foreshadow more serious conditions later in life. This often happens via the “snowball effect,” in which a “minor” imbalance within the body produces a cascade of biological triggers that can eventually lead to poor health and chronic illness. For this reason, functional medicine focuses on the prevention, instead of just the treatment of, even the most minor imbalances.
Through changes in lifestyle, environment, and nutrition, functional medicine professionals rely on their knowledge of key physiological, genetic, and biochemical processes for establishing an innovative form of total patient wellness amidst the diversity of interests in health care today.
What is practice based evidence?
Promotes the value of the knowledge and evidence gained from the practitioner’s clinical experiences and observations.
Kathie Madonna Swift, Elizabeth Redmond and Sheila Dean, 2009 DIFM www.IntegrativeRD.org