Principles of Integrative Healthcare.

• Integrative Medicine is the appropriate use of mainstream conventional and alternative methods to enhance the capacity for healing.
• Integrative physicians embrace a variety of safe and effective options in their diagnosis and treatment, including: education for life style changes and self-care; complimentary alternatives; conventional drugs and surgery.
• Integrative medicine is a philosophy that does not arbitrarily reject conventional medicine nor accept alternative medicine; but rather, seeks to continuously improve care through utilization of scientifically valid healing modalities.
• Searching for the underlying cause of disease is preferable and more effective than treating symptoms alone.
• Integrative medicine is the use of evidence-based natural, less invasive interventions whenever possible, in accordance with a hierarchy of treatment phylosophy.
• Prevention is preferable to treatment and is usually more cost efficient. The most cost effective approach enhances the patients own healing capabilities.
• Integrative physicians encourage patience to evoke the healing power of love, hope, humor and enthusiasm, and to release the hostility, shame, depression and prolonged fear, anger and grief they may have.
• Illness is viewed as a manifestation of a dysfunction of the whole person, not as an isolated event.
• Integrative medicine recognized that symptoms and illness can be an opportunity for learning and growth.
• A major determinate of healing outcomes is the quality of the relationship established between the physician and patient, in which patient empowerment is encouraged.
• Integrative medicine partners with patients, their families and all licensed practitioners of healthcare who utilize a scientific basis of pathophysiology as a foundation to their healing practices.
• Optimal health is much more than the absence of sickness. It is the conscious pursuit of the highest qualities of the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, environmental and social aspects of the human experience.

Home  About  Membership  Disclaimers  Calendar  Join  Members Only