INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE

One of the strengths of family medicine is an openness to considering all of the factors that might be contributing to a patient's distress and dysfunction; this openness leads the family physician to consider a wide range of treatment approaches. As Hippocrates famously noted, "It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease, than to know what sort of disease a person has." For many chronic and disabling conditions, there is no single medical intervention that can address the problem entirely. Integrative medicine has the potential to ameliorate symptoms for many of these conditions. In some situations, nontraditional approaches can address pathophysiology in a way that biomedical treatments cannot.