Conventional and Traditional Medicine: A “Hand-in-Hand” Collaboration Benefiting the Patient and Healthcare at Large

This chapter discusses the potential benefits of a “hand-in-hand” collaboration between modern and traditional medicine in order to prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs). With industrialization, modern western medicine has become dominant stream in this field achieving significant milestones such as fighting infectious diseases through targeted therapies. Integrative medicine combines modern western diagnostic approaches along with traditional eastern complementary practices to provide holistic care. This can benefit both individuals’ health outcomes and global healthcare system by reducing burden of NCDs. Furthermore, our team propose the concept of Suboptimal Health Status (SHS), which is used to assess health status from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). SHS can bridge the gap between TCM principles and modern healthcare strategies for better prevention of NCDs by the developed assessment tool SHSQ-25, which has been translated into multiple languages, making it accessible globally. Overall, the hybrid strategy fuses advantages offered by western medical approaches and eastern practices. This ensures reproducibility thus playing essential role in the framework of predictive, preventive, and personalized medicine (PPPM/3PM).