Mission

NCIMS’s mission is to promote safe and effective patient-centered healthcare by providing continuing medical education and to protect the patient-physician relationship by impacting the political/legislative regulation of the practice of medicine.

The primary goal of Integrative Medicine is to augment the body's natural healing potential to enable a person to experience his or her optimal health and wellness.

What is Integrative Medicine?

Integrative Medicine is not to be confused with complementary and alternative medicine. Alternative medicine is about treatments not currently taught in conventional medical schools and that are not part of conventional treatment protocols. Integrative Medicine is a combination of mainstream medical practices and alternative medicine and tries to incorporate the best complementary and alternative medical ideas and practices into comprehensive treatment plans.

From the text "Integrative Medicine", by David Rakel, M.D., an Assistant Professor of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, some comments on Integrative Medicine include:

1. Integrative Medicine encourages more time and effort on disease prevention instead of waiting to treat disease once it develops.
2. Components of Integrative Medicine include:
   1. Provides relationship centered care
   2. Integrates conventional and complementary methods of treatment and prevention.
   3. Involves removing barriers to activate the body's healing response.
   4. Uses natural, less invasive intervention before costly, invasive ones when possible.
   5. Engages mind, body, spirit, and community to facilitate healing.
   6. Healing is always possible, even when curing is not.