What is Integrative Veterinary Medicine?
Integrative veterinary medicine is a comprehensive medical approach to pet care that combines the best of conventional medicine and complementary and alternative therapies.
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These modalities focus on maintaining health and wellness in the body instead of treating symptoms that occur from feeding our pets a poor diet and exposing them to unnecessary chemicals leading to imbalance and illness. We prevent illness by promoting health and wellness in our pets instead of focusing on making symptoms go away temporarily.
Working Together to Provide More
The emphasis is on using all reasonable therapies or systems of medicine that work together to provide an increased capacity to prevent and treat disease that would not be possible using one system of medicine alone.
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This integrative approach to veterinary medicine is designed to minimize adverse effects, maximize successful treatment outcomes and improve the quality of life. Any veterinarian who uses therapies outside of conventional medicine and combines them with conventional medicine is an integrative veterinarian.
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Although this type of healing requires years of special training on the part of the veterinarian and a commitment to true wellness on the pet parents, it is incredibly rewarding to see the animals living long healthy happy lives, avoiding costly and dangerous surgeries and toxic chemicals.
Treating the Whole Body
Complementary and alternative veterinary medicine (CAVM) therapies that may be included in an integrative medicine approach include acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, tuina, chiropractic, therapeutic nutrition, nutritional supplements and Reiki.
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All of these therapies treat the whole body and as such can be referred to by the generic term “holistic,” meaning that they view the body as an integrated whole and take the body, mind and spirit into account when formulating a treatment plan. CAVM therapies are designed to stimulate adaptive homeostatic mechanisms in the body and or to provide the body substances by which the body can heal itself.