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Alternative medicine vs conventionalAlternative medicine (AM) defies conventional medicine in that it changes from culture to culture and country to country, and it is highly influenced by the local bio diversity of a particular geographical location. AM is integrative medicine, which collects the wisdom, the history, the traditions, and the spirituality of a people or group of peoples, and applies it to healing though natural methods in order to attain holistic well being. What separates AM from the conventional approach? While conventional medicine will tend to aggressively isolate and target a particular part of the body to heal it from a particular illness, AM will treat the individual as an multifaceted whole entity that, in order to heal, must find a balance on both the physical and spiritual aspects of his/her being. For alternative medicine, a man's spirituality is as important as a man's sexuality, and a man's emotions as important as a man's thoughts. AM methods may be folk knowledge, traditional, or spiritually based, and promotes self healing or healing from within, as opposed to traditional medicine which mainly relies on external elements to “attack, fix or destroy” internal elements that interfere with its notion of well being. AM has had a slow, but steady rate of acceptance in the West, as a result of the many benefits that many have obtained from it. Only a decade or so ago, alternative medicine was something relegated to hippies and Asian cultures, but presently, it has become part of our everyday lives. We find it in trendy, boutique style shops in our malls, or in an Online Pharmacy on the Net. AM's influence on Western culture is currently so prevalent, that it permeates every aspect of our lives, down to the mundane and basic. We now demand that our food products be tagged with labels that inform us if a particular food item was organically grown and is additive free, or if it was grown in a chemical pesticide-soaked field. We feel safer taking natural remedies than chemically engineered medicines. We now find more acceptable alternative cancer treatments than aggressive chemotherapy treatments, Natural cures for mundane things such as erectile dysfunction are very popular today, where a herbal Viagra is considered to be a better option than the conventional form of the blue pill. Efficient or not, the fact remains that AM is also steadily changing conventional Western lifestyle. Even conventional Western medicine has recently begun to look at alternative medicine with kinder eyes. Conventional medicine learning centers now define alternative medicine methods as 'complementary and alternative medicine' or 'CAM.' CAM is now part of the medicine programs at major Western universities. AM still lacks solid proof of its efficiency, however, things will never go back to the way they were before, when AM was only a stranger among us. |
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