Every type of holistic medicine has a unique approach to healing an individual, yet they intersect and complement one another in fascinating ways. Integrated medicine is the use of a number of different modalities to address spiritual, emotional, and physical dysfunction in the body, mind and spirit.

Reaching far outside of western psychology and other “talk” therapies, integrated healing utilizes a wide range of tools which “speak” to the patient and practitioner to reveal the root cause of an issue. This root cause can be the reason for a number of sicknesses – including depression, loss of passion, confusion about one’s life purpose, as well as more physical conditions ranging from skin rashes to dementia to obesity and cancer.

The Medical Model vs. The Spiritual Model of Healing

Let’s look at a single case to understand how integrated healing helps cure a root cause:

Physical pain or damage is understood only on a surface, Newtonian, level by most medical practitioners. Let’s say you go to a doctor because you have a skin condition. They don’t ask you about your emotional state, take a case history beyond the medical symptoms, or use internal wisdom, let alone see the energy body and what blockages may be present. They then send you home with a skin cream to “heal” the problem.

After the skin cream fails (because the root cause was never addressed) you return once again to the doctor. They listen intently, and with great compassion, prescribe you another skin cream, assuring you that it should take care of the problem.

After the second skin cream doesn’t work, you begin to doubt the efficacy of the traditional system, and you may begin to look elsewhere for answers.

Thousands of Years of Cultural Secrets Meant for Healing

While allopathic doctors are extremely well trained in looking at the physical and chemical composition of the body, spending many years in medical school doing just this, they are not taught to use wisdom, read the energy body, or apply methodologies that address the body beyond the chemical/physical level. This is where integrative healing comes in – utilizing any number of tools, ranging from meditation, herbal remedies, acupuncture, reiki, neurolinguistic programming, aromatherapy, shiatsu, life coaching, Feng Shui, Hermetic Qabalah, and all forms of Energy Medicine.

Each practitioner will draw from their own cultural knowledge about the energetic arts. With more than 100 systems of alternative medicines practiced all over the world from every country, region or tiny village there are healing secrets which have been around for thousands of years, contained in this body of knowledge. Each culture has its preferred method, but they all contain gems which can be used to address the root cause of a sickness. China and Japan have their own methods of acupuncture, the Hawaiians have Lomi Lomi massage. The French use magnetic healing; in India, they rely on yoga and Ayurveda, and so on.

When you start to doubt the young, inexperienced, Western allopathic system of medicine it is really your Higher Self guiding you to unconventional healing – which ironically, has been around for centuries. The ‘medical model of disease’ is based on collating symptoms, and applying either a drug or surgery. It doesn’t imagine that you could apply “psychic” or “energetic” surgery to an ailment.

Mika Ichihara at the Love & Compassion Integrative Healing Center in New York City describes her healing methods as such,

“I want to help people and to do this, I rely on a background in clinical pharmacy. This type of medicine only treats the symptoms of a disease, though. Through my training and research in Japanese acupuncture, reiki, qabalah, herbs, and other healing modalities, I can understand how someone’s diseases is caused by a disconnection from the Source. Their energy body will reflect this first and foremost. Only later will this manifest as disease. Usually people come to me when the disease has already manifest, but if I can help them before that energy has a chance to create dysfunction physically, they can bypass disease completely.”

The Energy Body Holds Patterns 

Going back to our example of the skin problem – an integrated healer will see some stagnation in the energy body of the person suffering from an itchy, angry, red rash.

They may know, intuitively that the diet is harming the person, and prescribe herbal remedies that addresses the itching, flaking rash, so that the person can feel some relief. The energetic cause of eczema or dermatitis might be appearing because someone has been under acute emotional stress or feeling run down. The causative agent might simply be too much stress. One dietary and lifestyle factors are addressed, the integrated healer will look deeper. There is usually an emotional cause for all disease, and discovering this is the first step in true, root-cause healing. Perhaps the person with the red, angry rash is prone to emotional eruptions – quite literally, a disruption of the mind on a frequent basis that is causing the rash.

And then, the practitioner will look deeper still. Those emotions might be subconscious – meaning the person suffering is often in an emotional state that they have no idea is caused by patterning in their energy body. The practitioner can sometimes intuitively understand how those patterns were created, and other times begin to reveal them by talking with the patient.

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Using an array of energy balancing and healing techniques, including acupuncture or reiki, the pattern is corrected, restoring the health of the skin. However, the mind, and soul are also healed so that the rash doesn’t pop up again in the future. Instead of just masking the problem, the root cause is addressed and healed.

In short, the integrated alternative health practitioner uses a number of modalities which can address all layers of our being – the physical (the most gross layer), the mental (a slightly more subtle layer), the emotional (more subtle, still) and the energetic or etheric (the most subtle level of existence).

Image: Source

This article What is Integrated Healing was originally created and published by LoveandCompassion.com under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Mika Ichihara, M.S., L.Ac., LL.M., B.Phar., Founder Owner and Grand Master in Eastern Medicine and Energy Soul Medicine. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution and author bio.