Integrative medicine or integrative health is a neologism coined by practitioners to describe the combination of practices and methods of alternative medicine with conventional medicine.[1][2][3] Some universities and hospitals have departments of integrative medicine.
Contents |
Integrative medicine has arisen out of an historical appreciation of the limitations of the dominant medical paradigm. While pharamceutical and technological approaches to medicine rely on isolated testing scenarios, which often fail to translate successfully to bring about the healing of real people suffering from complex and multi-faceted conditions, integrative medicine pays attention to forms of medicine that have arisen in other cultural contexts, often appealing to the intuitive intelligence of the patient and practitioner, rather than the alleged expertise of a laboratory researcher.[4]
Because the nature of integrative medicine is to attempt to merge evidence based medicine with alternative medicine techniques, as well as partially focusing treatment on the "spiritual", it is not without controversy. Accordingly, it falls into the same category of criticisms as much of alternative medicine does.[5][6]
Dr. Arnold Relman, editor in chief emeritus of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote:
Speaking of government funding studies of integrating alternative medicine techniques into the mainstream, Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale School of Medicine wrote that it "is used to lend an appearance of legitimacy to treatments that are not legitimate." Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine says, "It's a new name for snake oil."[6]
Organisations advocating integrative medicine in the UK have been criticised for promoting unproven complementary treatments.[1]