The term integrative medicine now refers to an approach that combines allopathic/conventional medicine and alternative/complementary medicine. Nevertheless, there are as many ways of combining these disciplines as there are practitioners. For some, this translates into primarily using pharmaceuticals while slowly integrating nutritional supplements or herbs as the practitioner gains knowledge and experience in their use. For others, it is pharmaceuticals, acupuncture, and herbs. Still others primarily use the more alternative/ complementary therapies and rely on conventional medicine for only a small number of patients.

Once a practitioner embarks on this lifelong process of integrating these areas of medicine, each in his or her own way, then the next level of effort is to see beyond their separate parts and to put them into a more comprehensively understood context. A practitioner should combine therapies carefully. While a willingness to employ a range of therapies is the first step in going beyond the old medical approach, practicing comprehensive medicine requires practicing integrative medicine in an intelligent, understanding way.

Viewing health care in this manner enables us to go beyond merely integrating methods toward intelligently applying imaginative approaches that are based on our increasing capacities to comprehend the deeper qualities of healing. When we comprehend something, we see the whole picture, or a greater picture than we had seen before. We see how the parts work together.

Based on excerpts from Healthy Medicine:  A Guide to the Emergence of Sensible, Comprehensive Care, by Robert J. Zieve, MD, Bell Pond Books, 2005.