What Is the Commitment to Interprofessionalism in Integrative Health and Medicine?

“Historical power inequities across professions”—this heavily laden phrase is the handiwork of a multidisciplinary set of practitioners who were convened by the Fetzer Institute in 1994 to guide communities of providers toward what they would call “relationship-centered care.”1 The 5 words are declared as the second of 2 bullets in a “knowledge” box in a chart displaying knowledge, skills, and values the group associated with optimal practitioner-topractitioner relationships (Table). I view that charge as a pole star for navigating interguild dealings. Empathy must guide the acquisition of such knowledge. How many practitioners of any stripe can say they’ve gone to school on the historic relationship to power for, for instance, nurses, chiropractors, traditional healers, medical doctors, and practitioners of East Asian medicine? Yet there sits that seemingly fathomable charge, glowing like a watery beacon, a distant goal in the boggy depths of interguild relationships. What a thought: To work best interprofessionally, must one know the inner power experience of both the colonizers and the colonized? This hard lesson returned to mind as I encountered 2 work products in recent weeks. One is a recent qualitative analysis of different organizational definitions used for such terms as integrative health, integrative medicine, and integrated care.2 The study found significant variation on how much these nominally whole system–focused organizations are explicitly interprofessional. The second is the way the professional makeup of the advisory council of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (previously the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) at the US National Institutes of Health fails to reflect an interprofessional charge mandated by the US Congress. This column explores these and other integrative health and medicine choices amidst the broader global emergence of interprofessional education and practice. The first forays of what we now know as integrative health and medicine began in the mid-1990s. Efforts were made to integrate new types of what were called complementary and alternative medicine practitioners with conventional medical delivery. The main categories of concern were licensed practitioners of chiropractic, acupuncture and Oriental medicine, massage therapy, and naturopathic medicine. Through a 1998 to 2002 exploration called the Integrative Clinic Benchmarking Project,3 I reported evolving efforts for inclusion. This early integration work was engaged amidst pent-up excitement about getting all of these formerly