Overview
Have you been dealing with recent back pain or chronic migraines? Or have you been stressed and anxious of late and just want to get back to feeling better? An integrative medicine session with us might be just what you need for overall wellness. Here’s what to know about the different types of integrative medicine and its benefits in improving your well-being.
What is Integrative Medicine?
Integrative medicine is a holistic medical practice that uses a patient-focused approach to maintaining health and wellness. A patient’s genetics, lifestyle, and environment, as well as their emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being, all play an important role in treating disease. Integrative medicine may sometimes be referred to as alternative or complementary medicine and can be used in place of or alongside conventional forms of medicine.
Practitioners of integrative medicine believe that diseases arise in your body when there’s an imbalance between your physical, mental, and emotional states. This imbalance can manifest itself physically as chronic pain and injuries or mentally as depression, stress, and anxiety. Integrative medicine therapies work to treat these underlying symptoms to improve your overall wellness and restore mind-body harmony.
What Types of Problems can Integrative Medicine Treat?
Integrative medicine can be effective in treating:
- Cancer
- Arthritis
- Diabetes
- Headaches/migraines
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- IBS
- Stress and Anxiety
- Coronary diseases
- PTSD
What Are the Benefits of Integrative Medicine?
There are multiple benefits to using integrative medicine. Most types of integrative medicine therapy are non-invasive, drug-free, and highly personalized, which is why patients prefer using them. Integrative medicine is effective at:
- Relieving chronic pain in patients with cancer
- Improvements in mood and cognitive function
- Managing symptoms of fatigue and sleeplessness
- Helping patients quit smoking
- Improve weight loss
- Decrease levels of anxiety, stress, and depression
- Improve the quality of life
What to Expect During an Integrative Medicine Appointment
If you’ve never been to an integrative medicine appointment, you might be wondering what to expect during your first hour-long session. A certified osteopathic or naturopathic doctor or trained nurse practitioner at Chris Strickland will begin by asking a comprehensive set of questions to get to know the patient’s current physical, emotional, and mental well-being, as well as their lifestyle choices, diet, and environmental factors that may play a role in the onset of disease.
From there, your doctor will devise a treatment plan that’s individual to you and may include sessions such as chiropractic adjustment, physical therapy, massage therapy, or guided imagery. Depending on your history and symptoms, the therapies recommended may complement or sometimes replace conventional forms of treatment like medications or surgery. While most patients feel relief almost instantly, many continue the various types of integrative therapies in order to maintain their levels of wellness.
For more information about integrative medicine , contact Chris Strickland at (706) 769-9779.
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