Can you explain Integrative Medicine?

Integrative Medicine: A Whole-Person-Focused Healthcare Model

Integrative medicine is a healthcare model that combines conventional medical treatment of disease states with complementary, whole-person-focused treatment. This approach integrates all aspects of an individual’s well-being, including physical, mental, and spiritual needs, to achieve optimal health. It goes beyond symptom relief and disease treatment, focusing on underlying root causes that can contribute to and cause illness.

Integrative Medicine for Mental Health

Integrative medicine is also applied to mental health care. Integrative mental health care moves beyond symptom management of mental health diseases and looks at the underlying root causes, rather than simply focusing on symptom relief and pharmacological treatment, which is the most common model of mental health treatment administered today.

Why Choose Integrative Medicine?

The reason integrative and functional psychiatric treatments are gaining traction today among providers and consumers is that people are dissatisfied with the unacceptable results of our traditional pharma model to gain symptom relief from mental illness.

Studies show that 35% of individuals who go through four medicinal treatment regimens do not get better, and 50-92% of people who are on traditional medicines to relieve symptoms relapse. People are looking for lasting recovery, which involves a more integrative whole-person approach, including an individual’s biology, genetics, and lifestyle as part of more thorough and insightful treatment planning that results in lasting recovery.

Many people can benefit from integrative psychiatric treatment, including those suffering from addiction, ADHD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, and eating disorders.

Resources for Integrative Medicine

For additional information about its many applications and benefits, explore our library of online resources, which includes integrative medicine articles, past and upcoming seminars and webinars, and functional & integrative psychiatry courses. If you are ready to take your knowledge and skills in integrative psychiatry to a new level, sign up for our Integrated Psychiatric Fellowship Program.