Integrative medicine is an approach to ones healthcare that incorporates an understanding of functionality and respect for both eastern and western models of health care.

Integrative Therapies is the integrated use of conventional and complementary practices. It makes use of the best available evidence of both approaches to healing. One of its important characteristics is that it considers the mind-body-spirit connection within the patient and regards the patient as a whole.
Practitioners of integrative medicine have training and interest in both conventional Western medicine and alternative and complementary therapies.

Some of the principles of Holistic Medicine outlined by the American Holistic Medical Association include the following:

* Searching for the underlying causes of disease is preferable to treating symptoms alone.
* Holistic physicians expend as much effort in establishing what kind of patient has a disease as they do in establishing what kind of disease a patient has.
* Prevention is preferable to treatment and is usually more cost-effective. The most cost-effective approach evokes the patient's own innate healing capabilities.
* Illness is viewed as a manifestation of a dysfunction of the whole person, not as an isolated event.
* The ideal physician-patient relationship considers the needs, desires, awareness and insight of the patient as well as those of the physician.
* Optimal health is much more than the absence of sickness. It is the conscious pursuit of the highest qualities of the physical, environmental, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social aspects of the human experience.

Integrative medicine is based on a physician-patient partnership in which both conventional and alternative modalities are used to stimulate the innate healing capacity of each individual.