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.
The term holistic medicine relates to a wide number of therapies that are designed to treat the whole of a person, both their body and mind. It is often, therefore, seen in contrast to the drug therapies offered by big pharmaceutical companies – and surgery, for that matter – as a means of dealing with all ailments rather than focusing on 'cures' for specific pathogens or treating individual symptoms. Some, therefore, argue that holistic medicine frames conventional Western medicine as one that is narrow in its approach and ultimately unnatural. Holistic medicine is consequently considered an alternative therapy or, more accurately, a combination of alternative therapies. Today, some doctors combine the principals behind holistic therapies with conventional ones. However, this is not yet routine in the West.
Western medicine is the term that is used for the diagnoses and treatments of diseases and other ailments in the west from the time of the ancient Greeks. In some cases, people simply refer to it as 'medicine'. However, the term western medicine is also used in order to distinguish it from alternative healing methods and TCM traditional Chinese medicine. As well as developing treatments and cures, western forms of medicine are also applied in preventative fields and public health programmes. Today, the practice is both highly specialised and multi-disciplinary taking in anything from physiotherapy to keyhole surgery and psychiatry to chemotherapy.
New articles and open conversations about western medicine regularly. Sign up today.