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Alternative Medicine 101

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Alternative Medicine 101

By Jo Mendoza

The term Alternative Medicine is somewhat erroneous since it was already in effect long before conventional medicine was introduced. Alternative Medicine is the natural treatment of disease which came before the tech nologically-based practices of conventional medicine. In this aspect, alternative medicine is traditional while conventional medicine is relatively new. Nevertheless, alternative medicine is termed as such since conventional or traditional Western medicine is the norm that is taught in all the medical schools and applied in most hospitals. There is a wide variety of alternative medicine that has accumulated over the years through different cultures. Whole medical systems such as homeopathic medicine, a treatment that originated in Europe, which stimulates the body’s ability to heal itself; Naturopathic medicine, also from Europe, a system that uses dietary and lifestyle changes as well as herbs, massages, and joint manipulation; traditional Chinese medicine from China which uses herbs, meditation, and acupuncture to correct the imbalance of yin and yang which causes the disease; and Ayurvedic medicine, a medical system from India that integrates the body, mind, and spirit to prevent and treat disease.

A practitioner of alternative medicine tends to focus on the whole person when making diagnoses. They take great pains to figure out how one body system affects another. Cancer, for example, is seen as a systemic disorder that can be

2 cured by boosting the body’s natural immune system. The tumor is merely one physical expression of the systemic disorder and simply shrinking or removing the tumor does nothing to cure the disease.

It is a different way of healing. Consider the way a doctor of na turopathy treats a patient. Victoria describes what happened when she took her five

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