Comprehensive Medicine

Comprehensive Medicine includes Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and Western Medicine. It defines an inclusive way of thinking about medicine that considers how our entire being is impacted by both a particular health issue or condition and a prescribed treatment.
Our Comprehensive Medicine diagram is modeled after a Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) chart that appears on several health-related websites.* We recreated the image and include it on our site to help our users who are newly familiar with CAM understand how the disciplines covered on Jill’s List fit into a Comprehensive Medicine system.

Please note that many CAM disciplines fall into more than one category depending upon the techniques used within an individual form. When this is the case, we have highlighted that discipline’s primary category on our Comprehensive Medicine diagram and have noted the other categories in the description.

What does each category mean?

Body-Mind Intervention:

Disciplines including Yoga and Zero Balancing, as well as treatments such as Meditation fall into this category. These are biologically non-invasive techniques that work to enhance the synergies between the mind and body by aligning one’s energy with one’s physical structure.

Biologically-based Therapies:

Disciplines including Nutrition as well as those within the system of Western Medicine fall into this category. They are typically science-based and can range from non-invasive treatment techniques (diet changes) to highly invasive treatments (pharmaceuticals, surgery.)

Manipulative Body-Based Therapies:

Disciplines including CranioSacral Therapy, Chiropractic, Massage Therapy, Pilates and Structural Integration fall into this category. These modalities involve for the most part slightly invasive techniques that manipulate one’s physical structure, including muscular and skeletal systems.

Energy-Based Therapies:

Examples of disciplines that fall under this category are Acupuncture, Aromatherapy, Energy Medicine and Reiki. Treatments performed within these areas of practice range from non-invasive (Reiki, Aromatherapy) to somewhat invasive (Acupuncture needling) treatments that focus on balancing one’s energy pathways, fields and systems and aligning one’s energetic and mental/emotional/physical structures.

Systems of Medicine:

Systems of Medicine include Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) which encompasses disciplines such as Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine, Ayurveda, a medicinal system native to the Indian subcontinent and Western Medicine, among others. Systems of Medicine are approaches to medicine which have a particular premise or foundation that informs the disciplines, treatments and techniques within that system.

* Specifically, we were inspired by the chart on the Acupuncture CAM Therapy Institute website.