Alternative Medicine
Fringe Medicine, Natural Medicine, Alternative Medicine, Unconventional Medicine, Holistic Medicine, Complementary Medicine, Integrative Medicine (some even like the term Vernacular Medicine) — all these are titles that have been applied to a body of therapies practiced, for the most part, outside the boundaries of orthodox medicine, and by practitioners with no qualifications that conventional doctors and traditional medicine would recognize.
These health and therapeutic practices are essentially based on untraditional principles, methods, treatments or knowledge, and are often premised upon metaphysical belief. If the alternative health practice is offered along with traditional medicine, it is habitually referred to as "complementary medicine."
Most alternative therapies have a propensity to focus in treating the whole patient, making use of preventive measures, rather than attacking symptoms — and also tend to promote positive health as opposed to simply eliminating disease. The patient may be advised to switch to a healthier diet, or to stop smoking, or to learn how to cope with stress by practicing yoga, meditation, or auto-suggestion. He may also be encouraged not to assume the traditional passive patient role; instead he is to regard the preservation of his own health and, to a surprising extent, the treatment of his disease, as a matter for his own individual efforts.
The most popular alternative therapies are relaxation techniques, Chiropractic and massage. Other well-known treatments include Osteopathy, Naturopathy, Acupuncture, Acupressure, Homeopathy and Reflexology. Hypnosis, Yoga, meditation, the latest diet — all these, too, can lie in the borderland between conventional and alternative medicine.
It is estimated that alternative medicine is a $25 billion a year business. Most insurance companies, however, do not cover alternative medicine treatments. The one thing that all of these practices have in common is that, for orthodoxy, they are unscientific. In other words, they do not fit within the current medical scientific framework explaining the way in which the human body works. They also have little or no research behind them to back up their claims to be legitimate, effective treatment.
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Yet, while science awaits for satisfactory evidence of their claims, the number of satisfied customers of these therapies continues to grow. And many of their clientele are people that went to them as a last resort, when all else, including traditional medicine, had failed. These two factors have contributed to concurrent public dissatisfaction with orthodox medical care and skyrocketing conventional health treatment costs. Generosity with time and personal attention has been another strong suit of alternative medicine throughout its history, and is often the reason patients select unconventional doctors rather than impersonal traditional doctors.
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In a now famous survey published in 1993, Harvard’s David Eisenberg reported that one in three Americans had used one or more forms of unorthodox medicine in 1990, and expressed surprise at the massive presence of healing alternatives in American society. When Eisenberg and his colleagues repeated the survey in 1997, furthermore, they found that “alternative medicine use and expenditures have increased dramatically” since the first study: now 40% of the population employed such practices.
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Recently, the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine has supported a number of research studies of unorthodox cures, including the use of shark cartilage to treat cancer, the effectiveness of bee pollen in treating allergies, and the use of acupuncture for treating depression and attention-deficit disorder. Furthermore, mainstream medicine’s historic disdain for alternative medicine has softened remarkably in the last few years. Conventional physicians have discovered an unexpected level of professionalism among their alternative counterparts, as well as evidence of effectiveness for several popular alternative therapies.
Even in the light of these developments, the past probably will not be left behind without a struggle. Wounds from historic conflicts between mainstream and marginal practitioners have yet to fully heal and could easily be reopened.
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Sources: (1) Dictionary of the Occult, Caxton Publishing; (2) Whorton, James C., Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America, Oxford University Press; (3) Longe, Jacqueline L., The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine, Thomson Gale; (4) Mysteries of Mind, Space & Time: The Unexplained, H. S. Stuttman Inc. Publishers.
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