Your health is one of the most important aspects of your life that, largely, you can have control over. Nutrition, diet, exercise, medical treatment - these are all variables in which you have a choice of what goes into your body and what treatment is done to your body.

 

For this reason, it is important to understand the medical and health options available to maximize optimal health and wellness in your life.

For most diseases, conventional medicine treats symptoms alone, usually with drugs or surgery. While sometimes necessary, this can lead to long-term management with an improvement in symptoms at the cost of side effects, which often require more drugs.

 

Typical Problems with Conventional Medicine:

• Conventional or modern medicine doesn't acknowledge the body's self-healing ability. 
• Conventional medicine focuses more on illnesses that are supposedly caused by genetics, instead of causes such as nutritional and environmental factors.
• The acceptance of only genetics and viruses as causing disease can lead to people not taking responsibility for their health. 
• Conventional medicine is based on a mechanical and materialist paradigm that reduces the body to no more than a series of parts instead of a whole functioning system where everything is connected. 
• Everyone is different. Some people get ill despite getting their flu shot or don't respond to medication or supplements.

Complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) have been practiced for thousands of years and was largely introduced to the western world through immigrants from other countries.

The scientific evidence at one point was limited which is why patients sometimes question its benefits and effectiveness. But, now more than ever, CAM is increasing in popularity. Over the last few decades an increasing amount of research has been published on the effectiveness of CAM therapies, including Chiropractic, homeopathy, acupuncture, herbal medicine and anthroposophic medicine, in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Additional reasons include: 

• The general population is becoming more interested in participating in their health care decisions. For this reason, patients are looking at all possible options, including CAM.
• People today are under more stress than ever, so new ways are being sought to cope with the additional stress and tension in life. 
• The increasing resistance to antibiotics is another reason why CAM is becoming more prevalent.
• CAM therapies may offer significant cost savings to public health bodies.
• CAM offers a preventative care approach to healthcare, vs. a reactive care approach. 

Alternative medicine tends to be holistic, where an individual's health is considered as a whole and treatment not just focused on the symptoms. Alternative medicine offers natural methods to aid the healing powers of the body to return to a state of optimal health. Treatment is holistic; that is it takes into account every aspect of a patient and not just on the health symptoms that he or she is experiencing. 

The integrative trend is growing among providers and health care systems, although a number of physicians still do not practice CAM due to these reasons:

• Many have not been taught about CAM in medical school training, so these physicians are not properly educated to offer these services to the patients who may benefit from them.
• The American Medical Association developed standards that physicians are expected to comply with in order to become and stay licensed. Alternative care deviates from the AMA standards.
• Insurances plans may not provide benefits for treatments and therapies that are considered CAM, or may provide limited benefits.
• There is not an abundance of professionally published data on the subject. There are numerous books and articles that are of the authors' opinion, but few which are of fact and scientifically proven.