Also known as complementary medicine, alternative medicine covers a wide range of treatments that people use all over the world to deal with their symptoms and to seek cures for their conditions. Although it lies outside the orbit of conventional, western medical science, certain alternative therapies are gaining ground in some hospitals. In places where western medicine is restricted or unavailable, alternative medicine is still the mainstay of healthcare for many people. Although some people are quite happy to accept two different medicinal frameworks, others deride alternative remedies as nothing more than quackery.
In psychotherapy, anger management is a means of helping people to recognise the warning signs of anger and to find ways of preventing them from developing any further. At its simplest, an example might be counting slowly to ten when we begin to become frustrated with a situation so that we don't lash out unnecessarily quickly. However, such homespun ideas have been developed by therapists into much more tailored programmes designed to help people who become angry. Essentially, contemporary anger management therapy boils down to helping people to identify why they may feel powerless, frustrated or thwarted and to take action regarding the root cause rather than simply giving in to feelings of anger. As such, it tends to be tailored to the individual or group receiving the therapy.
Ethics and morals are a means for people to organise their ideas concerning concepts like right and wrong. In this sense, ethics and morals have been at the forefront of religious and philosophical thinking for as long as human beings have been interacting with one another. Various traditions of ethics and morals exist, including Greek, Egyptian, Islamic and Thomist, to name just a few. The questions relating to the topic have been posed – and, sometimes, answered – by some of the biggest names in the history of human thought including the Buddha, Confucius and Immanuel Kant, among others. Although the way in which moral philosophy is dealt with within each of these traditions differs, the focus on ethical behaviour tends to highlight issues like crime, justice, truth, virtue, good and evil.