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The evolution of the field may be traced back to the flourishing of new sets of ideas and values in the cultural revolution that was the Sixties. While classified as a counterculture by the dominant school, it can be viewed today not as a reaction but as an affirmative expression of new ideas. Some of these new values link directly to the ideas and practices carried in integrative health: awakening awareness of Eastern culture and practices such as meditation and acupuncture; back-to-the-land respect for natural cycles; rise of environmental awareness and of adverse effects of chemicals; the woman’s movement and the respect for more supportive approach; and, the use of marijuana and the attendant interest in the potential medicinal value of herbs of various kinds.

Other Sixties influences had a more indirect relationship with what would become the movement for integrative health and medicine. The rise in globalization and thus multicultural diversity fostered an opening to diverse medical traditions. The social justice movement, like that of feminism, challenged white, patriarchal Eurocentrism. While producing multiple advances, the dominant medicine of the time was marred by a long list of negatives: physician-centric; specialist and hospital focused; male-dominated; white and racist; known for minimal interprofessional respect and often abusive toward other practitioners; disrespectful to possible contributions from other cultures; reductive; and, finally, diminishing toward both the public health and the behavioral and social determinants of health. In these areas of the conventional medical culture, the values for a new kind of more holistic health care that emerged in the Sixties were potential antidotes.