Principles of Integrative Care, White Paper

Integrative Healthcare arose from the need to re-humanize healthcare, to go beyond a purely biomedical approach and honor the importance and complexity of the human experience in health and healing. Experts in the field developed the following definition of Integrative Healthcare to guide its implementation and expansion.

Integrative Healthcare is an approach to care that puts the patient at the center and addresses the full range of physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and environmental influences that affect a person’s health. Employing a personalized strategy that considers the patient’s unique conditions, needs and circumstances, Integrative Healthcare uses the most appropriate interventions from an array of scientific disciplines to treat illness and heal disease and help people regain and maintain optimum health. Underlying these principles is the recognition that all care rests on an open and compassionate relationship between patient and provider and that to achieve the best results, patients need to be empowered to become fully engaged in their own care.

Most importantly, Integrative Healthcare places a strong focus on helping people achieve and maintain health and embraces the definition of health as put forth by the World Health Organization — “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”