What is integrative medicine?
Integrative Medicine is an approach to care that looks at the whole person. It looks at the stressors, nutrition and how a person sleeps. It puts the patient at the center and is a practitioner partnership to address the full range of emotional, mental, social, and environmental influences that affect a person’s health. It employs a personalized strategy that considers each patient’s unique circumstances. It uses the most appropriate interventions from an array of scientific disciplines incorporating Lifestyle Medicine, Functional Medicine, and Allopathic Medicine to plan to help a patient regain and maintain optimum health wherever they are in life. It regards the patient as an active partner who takes personal responsibility for their health. It is preventive focused and a lifelong journey.
It is grounded in the definition of health. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, social, mental wellbeing and not just the absence of disease or infirmity”.
Integrative Medicine seeks to restore and maintain health and wellness across a person’s lifespan. Through personalized care it goes beyond the treatment of symptoms to address the patient’s immediate health needs as well as the effects of the long term and complex interplay between biological, psychosocial, and environmental factors.
It is not the same as alternative medicine, which refers to an approach to healing that is utilized in place of conventional therapies, or complementary medicine which refers to healing modalities that are used to complement allopathic conventional approaches. If the defining principles of Integrative Medicine are applied care can be integrative regardless of the modalities that are utilized.
The defining principles of Integrative
Medicine are as follows
The patient and the practitioner are partners in the healing process.
Works collaboratively with the patient and a team of interdisciplinary providers to improve the delivery of care.
All factors that influence heath, wellness and disease are taken into consideration, including body, mind, spirit and community.
Good medicine is based on good science. Uses an evidence-based approach from multiple sources of information to integrate the best therapy for the patient, be it conventional or complementary. It is inquiry driven and open to new paradigms.
Effective interventions that are natural and less invasive are used whenever possible.
The care is personalized to best address the individual’s unique conditions, needs and circumstances.
In addition to addressing and handling the immediate health problem(s), as well as the deeper causes of the disease of illness, Integrative Medicine strategies are focused on prevention and foster the development of healthy behaviors and skills for effective self-care that patients can use throughout their lives. The priority is wellness.
Schedule an Appointment
Hours
Monday -Friday: By appointment only
Location
2821 Kavanaugh Blvd., Ste. 3F
Little Rock, AR 72205
Contact
(501) 214-5700
[email protected]