Alternative medicine, as the word implies, is a different form of medicine than what is popularly known. It is an alternative to what is practiced by the scientific form of medicine. It is more like an art than a science. However, in many populations around the world, it is known to have existed for more than 5,000 years.

It is the form of medicine our great-great-grandparents relied on before scientific medicine arose. Scientific medicine seems to have cast aside the oldest form of medicine. But over the last decade, it seems that people have increasingly relied on alternative medicine to treat their ailment. Some articles actually speak of an increase in that form of medicine.

There are many forms of alternative medicine: acupressure, acupuncture, aromatherapy, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, chiropractic, herbal medicine, homeopathy, hydrotherapy, massage therapy, music therapy, naturopathy, reflexology, reiki, tai chi, yoga.

Each of them can work based on a different philosophy. Most of those philosophies do not yet have any scientific evidence. It seems to work very well with some patients. In other cases it doesn’t seem to have any effect. A popular case is that of the famous Steve Jobs. After being diagnosed with cancer, he decided to rely on alternative medicine for his cure even though his doctors suggested that he would rather have surgery.

After 9 months of relying on the alternative therapy, the cancer worsened and spread to other organs. He ended up having surgery, but the doctors had to remove certain organs that became infected because the cancer spread to them. Some critics are actually using this fact to support the idea that if Steve Jobs had had surgery sooner, he might have lived a little longer.

However, the number of patients who trust alternative medicine seems to increase every year, why? The fact is that there are some diseases that have not yet found a how to take phentermine 
remedy in scientific medicine and seem to have found a solution in alternative medicine.

Back pain is known to be resolved with chiropractic doctors. Many women with labor problems claim that they were able to get pregnant with the help of an acupuncture doctor. Early studies in aromatherapy and essential oils seem to suggest that it speeds up the body’s healing process. It is known that those who practice yoga or tai chi tend to get sick much less frequently compared to those who do not practice those things.

Is alternative medicine better than scientific medicine?

Alternative medicine is much more about finding the root cause of the problem the patient is going through than simply trying to eliminate it. Scientific medicine relies much more on finding the symptoms that cause the disease than on prescribing the necessary drugs or surgery to solve the problem.

Both approaches are neither good nor bad. As a general rule, unconventional medicine can be used to maintain general health, but when it comes to severe cases, it is always advisable to contact a conventional doctor. A new form of medicine called integrative medicine has been born that tends to combine the two, bringing out the best of both schools of thought.