Holistic integrative medicine: toward a new era of medical advancement

Abstract

Medicine has encountered unprecedented problems associated with changes in nature, society, and environment, as well as with new human quests for survival, longevity, and health. In the meantime, the development of medicine is facing challenges that resulted from the over-division and specialization of disciplines and the fragmentation of medical knowledge. To construct a new medical system that is more suitable for human health and disease treatment, holistic integrative medicine (HIM), which regards the human body as a holistic entity, organically integrates the most advanced knowledge and theories in each medical field and the most effective practices in various clinical specialties to revise and adjust on the basis of social, environmental, and psychological conditions. HIM is the inevitable and necessary direction for the future development of medicine. In this article, we illustrated the connotation of HIM, the differences between HIM and other medical conceptions, and the practice of HIM in recent years.

Keywords

holistic integrative medicine / precision medicine / general practice / medicine

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Compliance with ethics guidelines

Daiming Fan declares that there are no conflicts of interest. The manuscript does not involve a research protocol that requires approval from a relevant institutional review board or ethics committee. The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of his associated institutions.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2017 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg