Basic Tenets of Alternative Medicine
How the practitioner views the body is the primary difference between traditional and alternative medicine. While traditional medicine takes the approach of viewing the body as a conglomeration of systems and organs, alternative medicine sees the body as a whole.
Alternative medicine practitioners focus on bringing harmony to the body and establishing balance. They include the body, mind, and spirit in this process, and focus on preventing illness in the first place. Alternative medicine relies on herbal and holistic remedies and treatments such as massage and acupuncture. Practitioners also council patients on lifestyle changes needed to promote wellness and decrease their risk of illness.
The basic tenets of alternative medicine include:
Harmony of body, mind, and spirit promote health and wellness and reduce the risk of illness.
Illness is caused by imbalances in the body as a whole.
The root of the illness must be addressed in order to effectively treat and cure an illness. Treating symptoms alone will not cure a disease.
Optimal health is achieved only when the treatment plan is individualized to the specific strengths and weaknesses of the patient.
The practitioner is an educator with the responsibility to teach patients how to live a healthy lifestyle and how to care for themselves and remove obstacles that prevent them from achieving good health.
Empowering patients to take a proactive approach to their health and wellness instead of relying on medical professionals to cure them has always been a premise of alternative medicine and is one that traditional Western medicine has recently adopted.
Students of alternative medicine will find many overlapping areas of science and philosophy. Anatomy, physiology, biology, chemistry, physics, and math are the basic foundation of both alternative and traditional medicine and should be taken in undergraduate work.
