A system of medical practice that aims to combat disease by use of remedies (as drugs or surgery) producing effects different from or incompatible with those produced by the disease being treated.

Allopathy is also called ‘modern’, ‘western’, or ‘scientific’ medicine. The term ‘biomedicine’, defined as the ‘application of the principles of natural science, especially biology and physiology to clinical medicine’, is also in use. ‘Clinical medicine’ is the medical practice involving and based on direct observation of patients or healthy volunteers who were given the drug that is being tested, to evaluate the drug’s curative potential, side effects, dosage levels, contra-indications, etc,, before recommending it for use. This concept is opposed to the earlier norms of medical practice based on theoretical study or laboratory investigation or class room teaching. Allopathy is now both biomedicine and clinical medicine. Nevertheless, a number of other systems like Homoeopathy and Ayurveda have also introduced the clinical element into their drug evaluation procedures.
History
The practice of medicine in both Europe and North America during the early 19th century is sometimes referred to as heroic medicine because of the extreme measures (such as bloodletting) sometimes employed in an effort to treat diseases.[6] The term allopath was used by Hahnemann and other early homeopaths to highlight the difference they perceived between homeopathy and the medicine of that time.
With the term allopathy (meaning "other than the disease"), Hahnemann intended to point out how physicians with conventional training employed therapeutic approaches that, in his view, merely treated symptoms and failed to address the disharmony produced by the underlying disease.[clarification needed] Homeopaths saw such symptomatic treatments as "opposites treating opposites" and believed