Big data is essential for further development of integrative medicine

To give a short summary on achievements, opportunities and challenges of big data in integrative medicine (IM) and explore the future works on breaking the bottleneck to make IM develop rapidly, this paper presents the growing field of big data from IM, describes the systems of data collection and the techniques of data analytics, introduces the advances, and discusses the future works especially the challenges in this field. Big data is increasing dramatically as the time flies, whatever we face it or not. Big data is evolving into a promising way for deep insight IM, the ancient medicine integrating with modern medicine. We have great achievements in data collection and data analysis, where existing results show it is possible to discover the knowledge and rules behind the clinical records. Transferring from experience-based medicine to evidence-based medicine, IM depends on the big data technology in this great era.