Coming back from the Integrative and Personalised Medicine Conference in London last month, I reflected on how big and successful the congress has become from its beginning back in 2022. When I first started practicing ‘Integrative Medicine’ there wasn’t even a term for it but the IPM really is changing the awareness of how we think of healthcare.

In general there’s a lot of confusion around terms like “integrative,” “alternative,” “holistic,” and “functional” medicine and honestly, even people working in healthcare mix these terms up all the time! We often use them interchangeably, when they actually describe quite different (if overlapping) approaches. So why does this matter? Well I think that understanding the distinctions between them does matter, as we’ve seen at the IPM, especially as Integrative Medicine becomes more clinically and academically established.

Integrative medicine is best understood as an umbrella term. It’s not a fixed rulebook. It’s more of a mindset, taking the best of conventional, evidence-based medicine and combining it with other approaches like functional medicine and more specific modalities like nutrition, movement, mind-body practices, herbal medicine, or acupuncture which would historically have fallen under the ‘complementary medicine’ model.

Alternative medicine, normally (in my opinion) refers to practitioners who use complementary approaches instead of conventional medicine, rather than alongside it. Someone using alternative medicine might choose homeopathy or herbalism over pharmaceutical treatment entirely, rather than using it as a complement. 

Holistic medicine is more of a philosophy more than a specific practice. And in Integrative Medicine the underlying principle is indeed that a person should be treated as a whole (mind, body, spirit, environment, relationships) rather than as a collection of isolated symptoms. Think of it as the lens of Integrative Medicine.

Functional medicine is more specific still. It’s an approach which focusses on identifying and addressing the root causes of disease and tends to be more diagnostically intensive. Functional medicine can be considered one approach within Integrative Medicine and indeed one we teach on our master’s Diploma. 

Lifestyle medicine is again a clinical discipline that uses evidence-based lifestyle interventions such as nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management and social connection, as the primary tool to prevent, treat, and often reverse chronic conditions. It’s grounded in conventional medical evidence and typically practiced by physicians and allied professionals within mainstream healthcare frameworks. Lifestyle medicine is incorporated as one component among many used within Integrative Medicine.

Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about Integrative Medicine is that it combines conventional medicine – it doesn’t reject it! It sits alongside it, using both where each is most effective. As Sir Michael Dixon put it in our recent podcast conversation, Integrative Medicine is really just “what medicine should be anyway” . It IS holistic and patient-centred and willing to draw from multiple toolboxes rather than just one.

The most crucial part of Integrative Medicine, is the practitioner uses a variety of approaches depending on what actually helps the patient. We have a toolbox of modalities to refer to, always working with the patient and what works best for them rather than staying single minded at the expense of others.

And in my mind, that is the most important thing – aeger primo, patient first.