I don't advocate alternative medicine. I think integrative medicine is clearly the way of the future. It's not about rejecting standard medicine or embracing alternative therapies uncritically. It's a new model that really looks at the whole person and looks at lifestyle and places great importance on the doctor-patient relationship, and then is willing to look outside the box to find treatments that are effective.
So I think that the term "integrative medicine" is really acceptable in academic discourse. ... I hope that eventually that this will replace the terms "alternative medicine" and "complementary medicine."
As I said, I am just very convinced that this is the way of the future.
We totally agree - integrative medicine is definitely a term we feel expresses the way of the future in health care.
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Hi there Shazar and thanks for visiting my blog a couple of weeks back and for (eventually) leading me to yours. It's lovely to know there are more naturopathic bloggers out there - I don't think there are many of us about. In fact, I don't know of any others, do you?
I'm a big fan of the phrase integrative medicine. "Complementary" and "alternative" still set the conventional medical model up as being the standard and naturopathy as the adjunct (fringe or otherwise). I guess the fear is that naturopathy will be "integrated" into conventional medicine, with no room left for the naturopath as a seperate professional. I don't think this is necessarily the case. Integrative medicine is still going to involve different practitioners and different specialists, but the difference will be, we're all working together for the overall health and wellbeing of the patient, instead of in isolation.
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