Learn to Speak Integrative Medicalese in 3 Easy Lessons
Lesson 1. Conventional medicine in this context is health care as practiced in the United States by medical doctors (M.D.s and D.O.s) and allied health professionals, such as psychologists, registered nurses, physical therapists and respiratory therapists. It's rooted in science. In fact, you'll also hear it referred to as biomedicine, which simply means health care based on applied principles of biology and biochemistry.
Lesson 2. Complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) is an umbrella term for any health care practice or product that falls outside the scope of conventional medicine. CAM has two main components: complementary medicine and alternative medicine. The distinction between these two components is small in the semantic sense, but huge in terms of practical implications for real-world health care decisions.
Lesson 3. Integrative medicine refers to the combination of conventional medicine with complementary treatments for which there is scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness. It's the gold standard in CAM today. And in some cases, it's an intermediate step along the way toward acceptance as a standard treatment. For example, biofeedback was once considered a CAM approach. But as evidence mounted supporting its use for a variety of health conditions, biofeedback gained a firmer foothold in integrative medicine. Eventually, the evidence grew so compelling that biofeedback came to be regarded as a conventional treatment for some conditions.
Jargon 401: Advanced Course
Once you've mastered basic Integrative Medicalese, it's time for the advanced vocabulary. From here on out, the terminology gets a little fuzzier, but the concepts are no less important.
Mind/body medicine includes therapeutic techniques that aim to exploit the mind's capacity for affecting bodily functions and symptoms. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine still classifies many widely used mind/body techniques as CAM; for example, meditation, mindfulness, art therapy and music therapy. However, others—such as biofeedback, cognitive-behavioral therapy for medical patients and patient support groups—are now considered mainstream.
Health psychology is a field of psychology that is concerned with the impact of thoughts, feelings and behaviors on health and illness. According to the Health Psychology (Division 38) section of the American Psychological Association, health psychologists help people maintain healthy lifestyles, avoid preventable diseases and manage chronic illnesses. When working with medical patients, health psychologists typically focus on psychological treatments or lifestyle changes. Some of these approaches are considered CAM, while others are considered conventional health care.
Holistic medicine aims to address the whole person rather than just a single illness or body part. Rather than focusing on physical symptoms in isolation, holistic practitioners look at them in context, taking cognitive, emotional, behavioral, spiritual, social and environmental factors into account. This is a broad philosophy of health care that can be applied to both CAM and conventional medicine.
The differences among these terms can be subtle—and subtleties tend to get lost in everyday conversation. Also, the definitions are constantly evolving and always open to interpretation. So this isn't the final word on CAM words, but it is a good starting place for discussion.
A Word to the Word-Wise
There's a Chinese proverb that says "the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names." It's obvious that learning the right names for different categories of health care may facilitate better communication. What's less obvious is that it may also help you get wise to your personal value system.
For example, there's an implied heirarchy from alternative to complementary to integrative to conventional medicine, where treatments graduate from one level to the next based on the weight of scientific evidence (rather than, say, ancestral tradition). You may or may not agree with that value judgment, but it's definitely something worth thinking about. And you might not even notice that it's there, shaping cultural attitudes toward both conventional medicine and CAM, until you start defining your terms.
What's in a name? A lot, when it's your health at stake.
Linda Wasmer Andrews is a word geek who specializes in writing about complementary/alternative/integrative/mind-body/holistic health.
Visit Linda online at LindaAndrews.com.| Follow her on Twitter.
Linda Wasmer Andrews is a health writer with a master's degree in health psychology.
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