While no one doubts that body, brain, and mind comprise an integrated system; modern psychiatry is increasingly practiced in an organ and symptom-specific manner. Integrative Psychiatry attempts to unify this fragmented approach in a responsible, scientific and clinically useful manner.

 

Integrative Psychiatry offers to optimize current available treatments, since the rush for scientific progress marginalizes proven treatments and age-old wisdom.

 

By using available knowledge, based on solid scientific data, TIIPS highlights the benefit of merging complementary aspects of medicine and psychiatry.

 

We want to identify conditions where integrative approaches to body, mind, and treatment are essential to recovery and maintenance of good health.

 

In fact, far from being revolutionary, the body/mind connection is intuitively grasped by all, and has been that way throughout human history.

 

The Institute consists of renowned physicians, academicians and healthcare professionals, all of whom are committed to making a positive contribution to the way we treat our patients.

 

Our guiding principle is ‘Optimizing currently available treatments’ rather than looking for new ones.

 

What is Integrative Psychiatry and why is it important?

Rami Kaminski, MD

The transition from life to death and the interaction between body and mind continue to elude modern science. Essentially, both are related to the same phenomenon:  the interaction between the abstract and the physical.  Complex physiological interactions animate the human body. Once they stop, we turn from a living entity, to a lifeless collection of cells.

We are all intuitively aware of the link between our thoughts and feelings and our physical body. For example, worrying about next week’s surgery (something that has not happened yet and in that sense occurs only in your fantasy), can cause some very real physical sensations. Your mouth gets dry, your pulse races, your hands shake slightly, you may feel “butterflies” in your stomach, tightness in your chest, your breathing becomes heavier, you may even feel dizzy or what is often referred to as “spaced out”. In other words, a single thought could trigger all these physical symptoms. This is true for all normal life events, from the way we get aroused by an erotic picture or story, to the elevation of blood pressure when we get angry and numerous other daily examples of how the abstract part of our existence affects the physical one.

Far from being a revolutionary concept, the body/mind connection has been intuitively presumed, if not well understood by many throughout human history. For centuries, moods were attributed to particular bodily...read more

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