How would you define the terms "alternative medicine," "complementary medicine" and "integrative medicine"?
Different people define these words somewhat differently, but the way that I think about it is that "alternative medicine" implies you're either going to use conventional medicine or you're going to abandon conventional medicine and use some sort of alternative. That's not what I, nor what most of us involved in this field would advocate.
"Complementary medicine" gets a little closer to describing the way that the sorts of modalities are used most commonly in this country. For example, if you happen to have cancer and you had nausea from the chemotherapy, you would hopefully get medication for the nausea, but it often doesn't work 100 percent, or you might not want to take another medication. So you might use acupuncture to complement the conventional care you're receiving because acupuncture is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as being indicated for chemotherapy-induced nausea. So really the non-conventional, if you will, is complementing the conventional.
"Integrative" describes an approach to the care of the patient. It's trying to care for a patient by combining the best of conventional and select non-conventional modalities. It's looking beyond just the particular symptom or complaint or even disease process that someone may have and trying to look at the whole person. It's certainly a lot more than trying to replace Prozac with St. John's wort.
