INTEGRATIVE
INTEGRATIVE means serving or intending to unify separate things. INTEGRATIVE medicine means combining allopathic and complementary therapies.
I spend a lot of my time on INTEGRATIVE thinking (How can separate things work better together?) and INTEGRATIVE action. How can what we learn from critical appraisal of research inform what we should do when it comes to making recommendations? How can what we learn from making recommendations inform what we should do when it comes to evaluating appropriateness of performance measures? How can what we learn from balancing desirable and undesirable consequences inform how we support shared decision-making with patients? How can what we learn from patient communication and interaction inform how we approach information display in the modern era? How can what we learn from usability and user research inform how we integrate with electronic medical records? How can what we learn from integrating with electronic medical records inform what we need to learn for continuing medical education? How can we learn from learning what we need to know inform what we do when critically appraising the research? This run-on series of questions could seem circular but there are many more overlaps throughout as this is an INTEGRATIVE view of medical information.
For NOSTALGIA though I think about INTEGRATIVE medicine. Putting together the best of conventional medicine and alternative medicine. Focusing on what we know about taking care of people and providing the best care rather than arbitrarily choosing actions based on convention alone. Before I ended up specializing in medical information I was on a path to be a rural family physician. On that path I was especially interested in INTEGRATIVE medicine as having the most support tools for my patients. It was not called INTEGRATIVE medicine yet but I went out of my way to embrace it, setting up an elective rotation from an allopathic medical school to learn osteopathic manipulative techniques.
The concepts persist and you can find more INTEGRATIVE medicine content in DynaMed Plus than any other conventional medical reference. (I guess you can consider DynaMed conventional now though I have never looked at it that way). Derived from DynaMed Plus we have started a new column in European Journal of Integrative Medicine. The following links may need journal access to view: