Traditional, complementary and alternative medical systems and their contribution to personalisation, prediction and prevention in medicine—person-centred medicine

Patients themselves demand an improvement in the quality of medical interventions with greater humanisation, personalisation of treatments and adequate information received in a safe environment to be able to make choices about their therapeutic process freely [1]. They want a doctor who will talk to them, listen to what they say and give them advice about how to get better and protect their health in the future. They want to be given the time and the space to express during the consultation, and once a therapeutic relationship is established, they wish to continue seeing the same person to give continuity to the process of healing. In many cases, the wish for a prescription is secondary to the wish of being cared for [2].Many doctors and caregivers already practise person-centred medicine (PCM) with growing interest from colleagues and institutions. There is a perceived need to create a more satisfying therapeutic relationship, individualising treatments beyond clinical guidelines to suit the whole person in the context of his or her bio-psycho-spiritual biography [3]. PCM takes on the task to rebuild an effective therapeutic relationship based on trust, empathy, compassion and responsiveness to individual needs and values. To become individualised, diagnosis and treatment need to take into consideration the human being in his or her full expression [4]. The central question in PCM is: how can we restore the integrity, the dignity and the sacred and ethical value of the human being as a bio-psycho-spiritual entity? This raises the further question: how can we develop a concept of the ‘whole’ if only the physico-chemical forces acting in the organism are considered real and amenable to investigation by scientific research? How can we investigate the psychological and spiritual realities of the human being? How can we go beyond a dualistic view? PCM is a concept that is becoming increasingly used in medical education, in primary care and in other fields of health car