You might perhaps be wondering what the term “integrative medicine” actually means, well if curious and you asked, you would get distinctly different answers. For those that support the concept you will be advised that “it treats the “whole person,” focuses on wellness and health rather than on treating disease, and emphasizes the patient-physician relationship“, however … (you guessed this was coming, right?) … it is in reality an umbrella that covers the non-science based complementary medicine and is simply a re-branding of it to make it more acceptable to the mainstream.
Eyeroll. SO many things wrong here. A person isn't a cell. In fact, a person has a lot of cells, more than I can count on my fingers and toes (also, not by coincidence, made of cells). What works in culture doesn't always work in humans. What works in animals doesn't always work in humans. Let me give you a real world example. Someone once decided to study the effects of patient environment on recovering stroke patients. They found that after controlling for everything they could think to control for, if the patient simply had a window in her/his room, they tended to do better in recovery. Furthermore, if a tree lay outside that window, an even greater effect was observed. There's no laboratory basis for this observation. We didn't need a million dollar study to advance it. It's a simple, cheap, patient-centric approach to help people recover. But the "evidence" crowd would have you believe this is stupid. There are countless examples in medicine of similar phenomena. Because coffee enemas are stupid and baseless (so I'm told), that doesn't mean that all medicine has to advance from benchtop to preclinical studies to the clinic. That's one way, but it's not the only way.
It's quite simple. If it has not proven as viable and working, it's not medicine. Things that are considered part of the Integrative medicine model, such as Reiki, Homeopathy, acupuncture, and Natropathy are not medicine. They are pseudoscience. Yes, having a window makes a person feel better. But bundling these scams as medicine is pure fraud.
It's not simple, and a window doesn't make stroke patients feel better; it helps them heal faster and more completely. That's totally different. Medicine isn't science. Medicine often needs science to improve, but there's a lot about medicine that has little to do with science. Confusing the two only exposes a lack of understanding of both science and medicine.
You're wrong. Medicine is based off of science. If it weren't for science based medicine, for evidence based medicine, we would still be exorcising demons from mental patients, we would be bleeding people dry to balance their humors, and we would be imagining we had magical witch doctor powers and heal you by waving hands over you. The fact is simple. There has been absolutely zero evidence that anything in alternative medicine actually works. You know what we would call it if we found it worked? Medicine. The components of integrative medicine have made some disturbingly dangerous claims. Including curing cancer and autism with chiropractics. Including spreading lies about vaccinations and trying to claim something as useless as homeopathy is a suitable replacement. All alternative has to do is prove it works. Which it can't under replicable scientific double-blind conditions.
Like I said, medicine advances through science and observation. That doesn't make science and medicine equivalent. Griping about specific claims made by some charlatans doesn't make me wrong. And it certainly doesn't mean that there aren't charlatans in traditional medicine either. The limitations of science-based medicine are well documented, and science-based medicine is often impractical or not applicable for many complex reasons. Asserting that it's "simple" betrays a deep lack of understanding of how medicine works. Not everything is quantifiable, and people aren't numbers on a page; we're subtle, complex, and emotive. Care providers (good ones, anyway) have a deep understanding of this.
Well, a re-branding worked pretty well for the Intelligent Design community. Can we throw the word "quantum" in there? I drove by "Quantum Chiropractic" yesterday and was tempted to go inside and begin every sentence with "quantum". Hell, I'd finish the quantum sentences with "quantum" too quantum. Quantum do you quantumly think they'd get the quantum point quantum?