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By Lawrence Reaves

Being sick or injured is a serious source of stress for countless people. Whether you are suffering from a seasonal case of the flu, nursing a broken leg, or coping with the symptoms of a long-term illness or condition, you want to understand the ways in which you can seek treatment for your concern. Understanding how to treat ailments both common and serious will do a lot to reduce the stress and uncertainly that comes along with being sick or hurt.

Alternative Methods of Treatment

Alternative medicine is a broadly used term that refers to methods of healing and health promotion that fall outside the range of allopathic, Western medical treatment. The Western medical tradition is thought of being primarily concerned with the identification of ailments and the treatment of those conditions with remedies that counter the symptoms experienced. The term allopathic comes from the Greek words allos, meaning ‘other’ and pathos, meaning ‘suffering’; in other words, the Western medical tradition has been historically concerned with reducing the impact of symptoms. While this is a simple outline of the conventional practice of medicine, it serves to illustrate the primary differences between conventional and alternative medicine.

Alternative medicine includes, though is not limited to, herbalism, energy healing, acupuncture/acupressure, massage therapy, applied kinesiology, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, and Ayurvedic medicine. Several forms of alternative medicine have been embraced by many conventional doctors and health providers as a means of supplementing the work they do. For instance, massage therapy is often recommended by doctors to patients who have experienced occupational injuries, car accidents, or who experience chronic pain. Certain health practitioners, such as chiropractors, fall somewhat between the worlds of conventional and alternative medicine. While some medical doctors remain hesitant to refer their patients to chiropractors, other doctors have enthusiastically embraced the chiropractic discipline and readily recommend patients to chiropractors as signs and symptoms indicate.

Who Uses Alternative Medicine?

If there are so many kinds of alternative medical practice, who exactly seeks it out? Countless people have sought out alternative answers to health concerns and medical needs at some point in their lives and they have done so for many different reasons. Many people who seek out alternative treatments are tired of the side effects caused by medication they’ve been prescribed. While all forms of treatment, conventional or not, carry some chance of undesired or unexpected side effects, the discomfort some people experience as a result of taking prescribed drugs are such that they are motivated to seek out alternatives.

Alternative medicine also tends to stress a holistic model of health and well-being. That is, practitioners of alternative medicine stress the need for a person to feel health in their mind, body, and spirit before health can be attained. To this end, many alternative treatments dovetail one into another. For example, someone experiencing situational depression may choose to pursue talk therapy, herbal remedies, and guided yoga classes to address the physical, mental, and emotional symptoms they’re experiencing.

The Future of Alternative Medicine

There is no question that people will continue to seek out new ways to treat sickness, injury, and ailment. As many of the treatments provided by alternative medicine continue to gain acceptance by practitioners of conventional medicine, we are sure to see more people seeking out and benefiting from these valuable treatments.

About the Author: Lawrence Reaves writes for Solstice Medicine Company, an online

supplier

of Chinese medicine that is an alternative to modern medicine. For more information on traditional Chinese medicine visit

this site

.

Source:

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