Integrative medicine is best defined as healing-oriented medicine that considers the whole person – body, mind, and spirit – and includes all aspects of your lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship between patient and physician and considers all appropriate conventional and alternative therapies for use.

In my practice, I see my patients as partners with whom I work closely with to ensure they receive the best and most necessary treatments. It is so vital that treatment addresses the many factors that influence and affect someone’s health status.

Additionally, integrative medicine focuses on the broader concepts of health by providing treatments that address immediate health concerns. For example, the goal is to live a healthy lifestyle and promote a person’s overall health and well-being now and into the future.

What Does It Involve?

The approach of integrative medicine is to ‘integrate’ conventional allopathic medicine and evidence-based complementary therapies to achieve optimal health and healing. It takes a special practitioner who understands the body from different perspectives and angles to know how to evaluate and optimize people’s health.

Why Integrative Medicine?

Respected and renowned physician and educator Dr. Andrew Weil, MD, has created this list of the principles of integrative medicine:

• A partnership between patient and practitioner in the healing process
• Appropriate use of conventional and alternative methods to facilitate the body’s innate healing response
• Consideration of all factors that influence health, wellness and disease, including mind, spirit and community, as well as body
• A philosophy that neither rejects conventional medicine nor accepts alternative therapies uncritically
• Recognition that good medicine should be based in good science, be inquiry driven, and be open to new paradigms
• Use of natural, effective, less-invasive interventions whenever possible
• Use of the broader concepts of promotion of health and the prevention of illness as well as the treatment of disease
• Training of practitioners to be models of health and healing, committed to the process of self-exploration and self-development.

How Our Relationship Will Work

Together, we will work closely to develop a personalized wellness plan based on your immediate health needs. We will discuss the development of healthy behaviours and design a set of self-care skills that you can use to fulfill and sustain your long-term health goals.

Remember, integrative medicine does not replace the medical care you receive from a primary doctor. Instead, it complements the existing treatments prescribed by a primary care and specialty providers.

Welcome, Namaste & Mahalo!