What is Alternative Medicine
To our current way of thinking, alternative medicine is anything that is not allopathic medicine, Western Medicine. Often these therapies accompany allopathic medicine and then they are referred to as complimentary medicine.
But it has not always been this way, indeed, the most effective alternative medicine systems, Chinese and Ayurveda, have millenniums of observation to support their effectiveness. We will try to explain these overall systems briefly and dig deeper into the herbal context, and you will see that they are both very similar, and both represent total lifestyle systems that are most effective if fully embraced. To dive into the entire assortment of lifestyle methods and treatments that are recommended and accepted by the Chinese or Ayurvedic methods, further online study or an actual consultation with a practitioner of these therapies will be required at first.
However, alternative medicine is not limited to these central ideas. There are many others that are derived from these and do quite well on their own. Acupuncture and acupressure, Energetic diagnosis and treatment (kinesiology), polarity, Reiki, etc., are all offshoots of the ancient effective therapies and they all have their place and it must be added, they are all effective when they are indicated.
One alternative medical treatment does not derive from these and this is homeopathy. When the homeopathic treatments were devised by Dr. Hahnemann in the 1800’s, this was an entirely new and unique method of diagnosing and treating illness and disorder. The similarity is that this method relies on body wisdom and underlying energetics, but the substances used in homeopathy are separate from other herbal therapies. This aside, it has proven to be an effective treatment method for everyone from children to geriatrics and even pets.