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FAQs:

What is Integrative Health?

Integrative health is an individualized, client-centered model of promoting optimal health and wellness, combining a whole person approach with evidence-based strategies to reduce disease risk by turning around lifestyle behaviors.

Integrative health relies upon evidence-based, safe, and effective medicines and healing approaches, along with valid principles of lifestyle or preventive medicine from a variety of traditions. As conventional medicine attempts to assist people with chronic ailments, it is often at its limits if drugs or more invasive, costly interventions fail to produce desired results, or if patients cannot tolerate side effects. 

This is where integrative health can usher in more choices that may not all have the same level of scientific evidence, but are useful in bringing about healthful outcomes. Generally, integrative health choices follow a continuum, starting with self-initiated care and behavior change, moving to gentlest interventions, and finally, to more invasive as a last resort.

Who Can Benefit from Integrative Health? 

Everyone! Whether you could use some deep breathing exercises to get you through a busy work day or acupuncture to help relieve chronic back pain, integrative health has something for everyone. Studies have shown that integrative health practices can help people recovering from short-term discomfort such as pain after surgery to those living with chronic conditions such as diabetes, cancer, arthritis, depression and anxiety, autoimmune diseases, and digestive complaints. We all have something in our lives that could be improved by integrative health approaches.

What are the Differences Between Complementary Alternative and Integrative Health Practices?

Complementary medicine refers to something you do or take along with treatment your doctor tells you to follow.

Alternative medicine refers to something you do or take instead of your regular treatment.

Integrative health care is the practice of combining complementary and mainstream medical care.

What is Integrated Healthcare?

Integrated healthcare is an approach to medicine that involves a varied and collaborative care team working together. It’s a holistic approach, meaning that it addresses your physical and mental health together. It accounts for social circumstances and other factors that impact your health, too. At its core, integrated healthcare is all about having a system of medical professionals who work together for your health. This can include physicians, therapists, nurses, specialists, and so on. It can also involve social services.

Why is Integrative Health Important?

In the mid-1990s, integrative health became a goal in Western medicine, and the objective was more than buzzwords. This multipronged approach to human health and wellness found medical practitioners teaming up across multiple disciplines to zero in collectively on the entire person—a change to the fragmented and costly standards practiced across previous decades. The exciting news, aside from better care, is that it’s easier than ever to be part of the team and to learn an integrative health and wellness discipline that is integral to the very best individual outcomes.

What are the Seven Domains of Integrative Health?

Integrative health is defined as “healing-oriented medicine that takes into account the whole person, including all aspects of lifestyle,” and includes seven core areas, or domains: sleep; resiliency; environment; movement; relationships; spirituality; nutrition. This framework can guide design professionals in including elements of the built environment to support each of these domains, and health professionals in understanding how elements of the built environment design can support integrative health.

Six Principles of Integrative Health

Here are the 6 principles of integrative health:

1. Integrative Health rests on a foundation of a unified whole (hale, original Latin for wholeness or health)

Mind is restored to body; spirit to matter; and subjective without objective ways of knowing are acknowledged and valued. Integrative health practitioners combine ancient wisdom with modern science, modalities from around the world, and individual responsibility within cultural support.

2. Integrative Health requires respectful collaboration among multiple disciplines

Integrative health practitioners restore a time-honored canon of supportive therapeutic relationships, deep levels of collaboration with other practitioners. Research by faculty at the CIIS M.A. Program involves multidisciplinary healing circles that benefit persons with long-standing chronic ailments.

3. Integrative Health is client-centered, and holds the client to be ultimately resourceful, whole, and having a narrative that is central to healing

The clients’ narratives inspire a commitment among integrative health practitioners to keep client needs and stories central and directive to their process of healing and recovery. Shared decision-making and co-created wellness visions are products of keeping the client at the center of the healing journey.

4. Integrative Health seeks to restore the dynamic balance of a living system

Dynamic balance is the fluid state of the self-organizing, self-correcting processes within the micro-/macro-cellular, biochemical, neuroendocrine, musculoskeletal and hemodynamic systems of the body interacting with its environment. Integrative health honors the intrinsic healing capacity within all living organisms, and acknowledges how that capacity requires interpersonal, societal and ecological cooperation.

5. Integrative Health seeks to accomplish the “triple aim” of the Institutes of Medicine: quality improvement, cost containment, and improved health outcomes within healthcare systems

Integrative Health is preventive and pro-active. Practitioners are able to refer to reliable sources of information, and seek first to do the least invasive, least costly form of intervention.

6. Integrative Health honors health equity

Integrative health is built on a foundation of advocacy for multicultural perspectives, cultural sensitivity, social justice, and health equity. Core values include fair access, empowered decision-making, client-centered care, and affordability. These values are upheld by integrative health practitioners.

Why Choose Integrative Health

Many people seek options to reduce their suffering or look to prevent illness down the road. Here are some of the health conditions:

- Chronic and acute pain which may include:

- Back pain

- Headache/migraine

- Joint/arthritis

- Stress

- Anxiety

- Sleep health

- Cancer treatment related side effects

- Digestive concerns (GERD/IBS/Food Intolerance)

- Weight and metabolic Issues

- Anti-inflammatory/ autoimmune conditions

- Cardiovascular health

- Women’s health (hormone issues/thyroid/menopause)

- Environmental sensitivities (allergies/sinus issues)

Integrative Health Approaches

There are many types of integrative healthcare services, and they are not one-size-fits-all. The key is to learn what your personal health needs are and to find the service or services that are best for you and address your individual symptoms. Examples include:

- Acupuncture

- Guided imagery

- Herbal therapy

- Hypnotherapy

- Massage therapy

- Meditation

- Nutritional counseling

- Progressive relaxation

- Qigong

- Reiki/healing touch

- Tai chi

- Yoga

Health Care Based on Facts about Integrative Health

Integrative health approaches are backed up by the findings of medical research. This is called “evidence-based medicine.” In addition, integrative health care is based on these other defining principles of integrative medicine:

1. You and your doctors are partners in your healing.

2. Your care team takes into account all of the factors that may affect your health and wellness, including your mind, body, spirit, and community.

3. Your body heals best when both conventional and non-mainstream methods are used in combination to promote the healing response.

4. Integrative health encourages the use of natural, less invasive approaches.

5. Integrative health physicians do not reject conventional medicine, nor accept alternative therapies without critically evaluating the evidence supporting their use.

6. In addition to treating your discomfort or illness, your care team understands that promoting health and preventing disease are paramount goals.

7. Practitioners of integrative medicine also live by its principles and continually explore and develop themselves.

How to Find an Integrative Health Practitioner

If you’re seeking out an integrative practitioner, there are a few things to consider. With the rise of “wellness centers” around the country, you want to ensure you’re getting the best care. Practitioners need to have a license/credentials. On top of that, you may want to ask questions such as:

- What is your education?

- How much training/experience do you have?

- Do you have client/patient testimonials or reviews?

The most important thing is that you feel completely comfortable with a practitioner. This ensures you’re both working together to improve your health and well-being.

Sources:

CIIS

UC Health

NYP

AAFA

SRX Health Solutions

UMMS

ACHS

Science Direct

The content herein is provided for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Medical information changes constantly, and therefore the content on this website should not be assumed to be current, complete or exhaustive. Always seek the advice of your doctor before starting or changing treatment. If you think you may have a medical emergency, please call your doctor or 9-1-1 (in the United States) immediately.