Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine (AIHM)

As a global educational authority, the Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine (AIHM) is an interprofessional community of healthcare providers, researchers and academics. They are singularly united by the common goal of advancing the knowledge, practice and policies that champion treating the “whole” person mind, body, spirit, community and planet.

In 1977, a group of visionary physicians, including Norman Shealy, Gladys Taylor McGarey, Bill McGarey, Gerald Looney, and Evarts Loomis gathered at Meadowlark in Hemet, California to lay the foundation for the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA). Norm Shealy became the first president of the AHMA and in 1978 the first meeting was held in Denver, Colorado. At the 1980 AHMA conference, Norm and his wife, Chardy, met Charlotte McGuire RN, and encouraged her to start a holistic nursing association. In 1981, Charlotte held the first national meeting of the American Holistic Nurses Association (AHNA). Over the next four decades, pioneers within AHMA and AHNA advanced holistic medicine and holistic nursing, at the same time that pioneers from naturopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, and East Asian medicine were advancing their professions in the USA.

Holistic physicians had another very important organization, the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine (ABIHM). ABIHM was working alongside AHMA developing certification for physicians. In 2013, leaders from AHMA and ABIHM came together with other leaders from other licensed integrative health professions, including chiropractors, naturopathic physicians, licensed acupuncturists, and holistic nurses, to form the Academy of Integrative Health & Medicine (AIHM).

AIHM emerged as a solution to Their growing healthcare crisis by bringing for the first time in history, all of the holistic and integrative health professions together under one organization – holistic medical doctors, holistic nurses, naturopathic doctors, chiropractors, licensed acupuncturists and many more professions.