Alternative Medicine, also called unconventional medicine, therapeutic practices, techniques, and beliefs that are outside the realm of mainstream Western health care

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Alternative Medicine, also called unconventional medicine, therapeutic practices, techniques, and beliefs that are outside the realm of mainstream Western health care. Alternative medicine emphasizes therapies that improve quality of life, prevent disease, and address conditions that conventional medicine has limited success in curing, such as chronic back pain and certain cancers. Proponents of alternative medicine believe that these approaches to healing are safer and more natural and have been shown through experience to work. In certain countries, alternative medical practices are the most widely used methods of health care. However, many practitioners of modern conventional medicine believe these practices are unorthodox and unproven.1

Acupuncture, a Chinese traditional medicine dating from 200-100 BC, involves stimulating specific points in the body for therapeutic purposes. Puncturing the skin with a needle is the usual method of application, but acupuncturists may also use heat, pressure, friction, suction, or impulses of electromagnetic energy to stimulate acupuncture points. Stimulated acupuncture points alter the chemical neurotransmitters released and the therapeutic effects result from the associated changes in the chemical balance of the body. Acupuncture is used for many ailments, including chronic pain, drug addiction, arthritis, chemotherapy-induced nausea, and mental illness.

In the past 40 years