Posted December 10, 200816 yr I'm curious as to how other people think about the concept of alternative medicine. While it is not taught for us for the purpose of actual practice, I've attended numerous seminars that have brought up the possible benefits of alternative medicine. This includes eastern homeopathic medicine and exercises where there's been recent testimony about their benefits in cases such as recovery and physical therapy after surgeries. There has yet been any NIH sponsored research conducted on these fields, so there's not really any firm evidence that supports the benefit of alternative medicine. I'm kind of curious what people outside of the field think about this topic. Feel free to share your opinions.
December 10, 200816 yr There are a lot of good things in it and a lot of potential but it needs more medical research to be applied to alternative medicine in general. There's nothing inherently wrong with it but there's a science behind it and it's a good idea to understand what you're working with. That's the problem with a lot of alternative medicine is the lack of research or anything whatsoever supporting it. I would love to see medicine and everything expand as a field because my personal experience with doctors, meds, and the medical system in general has been bad. Nowadays everything is online such as Pubmed and there's tons of research, info, drugs, etc that could benefit people now yet nothing happens. I could go on but fuck it I'm too tired.
December 10, 200816 yr Alternative Medicines???/ there goes the rose garden!!! http://img369.imageshack.us/img369/9425/waterqs1.jpg
December 10, 200816 yr I take tons of vitamins...everday I wake up and pop a 5-htp...then I take some DHA and other junk...there is tons of evidence to support it...most of it is fact...I've been doing this since my last year of High School and everyone agrees there's a difference...read anything by Jordan Rubin and you'll be surprised how chemicalized everything is all the way down to our shirts...and this guy is someone who had the worst case of Chrone's disease and wound up healing himself using basic natural principles.
December 11, 200816 yr Alternative medicine has been around so much longer than western medicine that I'm sure it contains many hundreds of remedies that clinical, systematic drug discovery techniques wont reveal any time soon. There's no problem making use of a remedy that works for you just because it's not widely recognized, even if it is just a placebo effect. I'd assume the only real problem is unforeseen drug interactions that many doctors, let alone shaman, would never realize until or even after it's too late. When the cure makes you worse off than you were before, that's a problem. The alternative practitioners don't have notes, or any real sense of what happened or why, so they can't prevent it from happening again. I think more effort should be made to bring the two divergent systems together, particularly researching the root cause of effective alternative therapies. None of this includes reiki, which is just total BS.
December 11, 200816 yr its all overpriced voodoo shit, vitamins are good but if you eat a healthy diet you will get everything you need
December 11, 200816 yr Author I'm not too certain about herbal medicine, but I recently attended a seminar on the effects of accupuncture, meditation, and tai chi in patients currently in physical therapy after surgery. Supposedly, many patients recovered at a much faster rate compared to people who don't do these practices. I'm not sure if it's a placebo effect or whether these people were more willing to live a lifestyle that helps them recover more quickly compared to others, but it's something I've wondered about. Only problem is that since traditional medicine isn't really looked at via modern medicine, I feel like it'd be hard to get an NIH grant to conduct a controlled study. Otherwise, I wouldn't mind actually doing a paper on this.
December 11, 200816 yr It's all psychological. It's a phenomenon I discovered called the placebo effect.
December 11, 200816 yr minor point, but drug companies don't make money by searching for drugs, they invest money doing that and then recoup it by selling it at prices only the rich can afford to get a drug from the lab bench to store shelves in north america is somewhere between $500 mil and $1 bil I don't know how the copyright/patent law would apply but it's entirely possible that if a folk remedy was commonly known enough then it would be considered in the public domain, and thus not worth the time of day from a big pharmaceutical firm edited since i posted last: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/10/AR2008121001601.html?hpid=moreheadlines 38% of americans use alternative medicine Edited December 11, 200816 yr by [myg0t]blocky
