The Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine (AIHM) is an interprofessional membership association of diverse health professions working together to transform health care globally - body, mind, spirit, community and planet. Her practice includes holistic women's health, fertility, pregnancy, labor and childbirth, postpartum care and pediatrics She brings years of clinical experience to her practice and believes in the integration of Eastern and Western medicine in order to treat disease and maintain well-being.
The following independent variables were significant predictors in the multiple logistic regression: (1) distrust of conventional physicians and hospitals; (2) desire for control over health matters; (3) dissatisfaction with conventional practitioners; and (4) belief in the importance and value of one's inner life and experiences.



Traditional Natural (Nature's) Medicine Practitioners are healthcare professionals who are educated and experienced in the use of safe, gentle non-invasive eclectic healing techniques geared at enhancing the body's innate healing ability which is responsible for re-establishing and maintaining optimum health.
In doing so, the researcher looked for instances of CAM providers' descriptions and explanations of the concepts of holistic, healing, and health in the different contexts explored in the study (e.g., in the providers' life, with respect to their religious beliefs, worldview, inter-, and intra-professional interaction with other CAM providers or biomedical providers), and an understanding of their own knowledge independently and in relationship with other models.

Phillip saw himself as setting an example for patient awareness, because: who is going to listen to a doctor who is overweight, smoking cigarettes, and having a martini at lunch time, and telling you that you need to eat right and exercise, obviously.” Phillip gave examples of thyroid diagnoses, where the typical allopathic approach is to receive synthetic T4, which, according to Phillip is problematic: for one, that synthetic T4 has to be converted by the body into T3,” as opposed to his approach to: high potency thyroid or an iodine-high diet supplement,” and then, test them again in 2 to 3 months to see whether or not that has helped in TSH levels to come down.” If they did not, Phillip sought to educate patients and refer them to an endocrinologist in this town, who will prescribe bio-identical hormones.” Phillip's discourse illustrates his ability to successfully network with biomedical colleagues such as neurosurgeons and endocrinologists.
In 2008 the UK annual spend on alternative health treatments was £4.5 billion, a market that has grown by nearly 50% in the last decade.4 This increasing expense would be surprising if people were not actually benefiting and may reduce the current increasing expenditure if it keeps patients away from General Practice and hospitals.
Despite their deep wells of medical expertise, many top hospitals are offering to help treat serious medical problems with reiki — a practice based on the belief that lightly touching patients can unleash a cosmic energy flow that will heal them naturally.

The mission of the consortium is to help transform medicine and healthcare through rigorous scientific studies, new models of clinical care, and innovative educational programs that integrate biomedicine, Shamanism the complexity of human beings, the intrinsic nature of healing and the rich diversity of therapeutic systems” (Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, 2004).
CAM providers' discourse represented holistic health as responding to the normative allopathic dialogue (in expanding the preventive discourse or the evidentiary criterion) rather than representing the knowledge and practice of CAM as constituting their professional identity on its own terms.

The purpose of the commission was to study and report on public policy issues in the rapidly expanding field of complementary and alternative medicine.” Furthermore, the commission was asked to report on legislative and administrative recommendations to assure that public policy maximizes the benefits to Americans of appropriate use of complementary and alternative medicine” (Executive Order 13147, 2000).