Integrated Health
© Chiva-Som, Thailand
Integrated Health is the gathering together of all the factors that contribute to your continued well-being and balancing them to enable you to attain your full potential all the time.
Preventive measures ensure your freedom from disease and adverse conditions; the most advantageous curative procedures, when ill, include using the best traditional and conventional techniques and optimizing your condition to take advantage of your full potential.
Most people today are in the borderline phase, neither healthy nor sick. If you go to a doctor because you have flatulence, excess weight or insomnia he will say it is not a disease. Likewise, chronic fatigue or lethargy is not a disease. So the doctor will only treat certain symptoms, say fever, diarrhea, a cough, or tissue damage, but he will not go beyond that to rectify the cause which might have started the symptoms.
That’s where Integrated Medicine comes to the fore. Prognosis or foretelling the advancement of health or disease is an important duty of an integrated medical physician. He or she must know what the outcome of a “borderline” state of health will be and warn the person in advance.
Conventional medicine treats the disease, often ignoring the individuality of the patient, and even the cause, in the blind rush to recreate normality.
Integrated medicine treats the patient as an individual and a cooperative partner to restore health and therefore fight off the disease. You may sometimes need that packet of pills but 80 per cent of the healing will still come from you, mostly through nutritional care, with exercise and therapeutic massage as well.
Conventional medicine is called allopathic, from allo (other), patho (agent of disease). In other words, conventional medicine introduces other pathogens, usually toxins (in the case of drugs or chemotherapy) to counter the original pathogen (the disease). Integrated medicine adjusts the lifestyle of the patient to restore the defensive network and the balance of the systems to their healthy state.
Conventional medicine therefore requires least effort from the patient, who simply remains passive. Integrated medicine demands full mental and physical cooperation and effort to build up defenses, but with a far higher ultimate reward – good health.