The goal of integrative medicine is to treat the whole person — mind, body, and spirit — not just an underlying disease. This can be accomplished by combining the best of conventional medicine with the best of less conventional practices — therapies that have a reasonable amount of high-quality evidence to support their use.

Researchers and health care professionals are finding that integrative medicine can provide positive outcomes for a broad range of pain causes. This is because pain is often a whole-body experience. Pain doesn't always come from just one source. There's the physical cause of the pain, of course — the injury, the joint pain, the muscle strain. But this physical pain can often be compounded by stress, frustration, fatigue, medication side effects, and many other factors.

Conventional medicine typically only addresses physical pain. This is where integrative therapies can step in, to help with myriad other factors associated with pain. For example, a person who has knee surgery might be prescribed an analgesic to relieve post-surgery pain, visit a physical therapist to learn exercises to get moving again and take a nutritional supplement to help with inflammation and joint health.