Acupuncture is one of the tools of a new emerging model of healthcare known as Integrative Health. Integrative Health seeks to incorporate traditional and emerging models of medicine that emphasize the restoration and preservation of the holistic and dynamic balance between the various aspects of the mind, human consciousness, and the physical body in health outcomes. In general, Integrative Health views acupuncture as a safe and effective approach that has been shown to be clinically effective and therapeutically useful for certain biomedically defined poor health conditions and symptoms, namely those involving pain and inflammation.
However unlike Western Medical Acupuncture, integrative acupuncture enables both the traditional and modern knowledge and application of acupuncture to be incorporated to compliment emerging healthcare concepts that are now targeting the field of physical-mental-spiritual healing known as Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), also referred to as psychoendoneuroimmunology (PENI) or psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology (PNEI). In this model, the traditional theories of acupuncture are preserved and included as part of a mixed approach that allows higher levels of human consciousness, including the patient's belief in treatment, to be accepted as places from where imbalances can originate and be healed.