TV Interview

The Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine defines integrative medicine as “the practice of medicine that reaffirms the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient, focuses on the whole person, is informed by evidence, and makes use of all appropriate therapeutic approaches, healthcare professionals and disciplines to achieve optimal health and healing”. According to articles by proponents, integrative medicine is not the same as complementary and alternative medicine nor is it simply the combination of conventional medicine with complementary and alternative medicine. Rather, it “emphasizes wellness and healing of the entire person (bio-psycho-socio-spiritual dimensions) as primary goals, drawing on both conventional and CAM approaches in the context of a supportive and effective physician-patient relationship.
Integrative medicine is sometimes lumped together with alternative medicine, which has received criticism and has been called “snake oil.” A primary issue is whether alternative practices have been objectively tested. In a 1998 article in The New Republic, Arnold S. Relman, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine stated that “There are not two kinds of medicine, one conventional and the other unconventional, that can be practiced jointly in a new kind of ‘integrative medicine.’ Nor, as Andrew Weil and his friends also would have us believe, are there two kinds of thinking, or two ways to find out which treatments work and which do not. In the best kind of medical practice, all proposed treatments must be tested objectively. In the end, there will only be treatments that pass that test and those that do not, those that are proven worthwhile and those that are not”.

In order to objectively test alternative medicine treatments, in 1991 the U.S. government established the Office of Alternative Medicine, which in 1998 was re-established as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) as one of the National Institutes of Health. However, skeptic Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale School of Medicine, said that NCCAM’s activities are “used to lend an appearance of legitimacy to treatments that are not legitimate”.[12] The NCCAM website states that there is “emerging evidence that some of the perceived benefits are real or meaningful”. NCCAM also says that “the scientific evidence is limited” and “In many instances, a lack of reliable data makes it difficult for people to make informed decisions about using integrative health care”.