After over five decades of vigorous development in China, integrative medicine (IM) has developed into an academic discipline with some overlaps but independent from both Chinese medicine (CM) and Western medicine (WM). CHEN Zhu, the Minister of the Ministry of Health pointed out that IM represents the developing direction for future medicine at the conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Chairman MAO Zedong' s important instructions on WM doctors learning from CM, which was sponsored by State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Chinese Association of Integrative Medicine in Beijing on November 27,2008. In this article, the author stresses basic research should be paid attention to in developing IM from the concepts and connotation, development and evolution, achievements and problems, layers and pathways of IM.