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.

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 acupuncture has become a well-known and widely available treatment in both developed and developing countries. There are 29 schools of acupuncture in the United States that are accredited or candidates for accreditation by the National Accreditation Commission for Schools and Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Many conventionally trained physicians take courses in acupuncture and incorporate it into their practices. Licensure or registration in acupuncture is available in 29 states plus the District of Columbia. An additional four states allow the practice of acupuncture by the ruling of the state board of medical examiners. It is estimated that from 9 to 12 million health care visits per year are for acupuncture.

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Acupuncture is one of the most thoroughly researched and documented alternative medical practices. While controlled studies have demonstrated some positive effects of acupuncture on a variety of conditions, the statistical results have not been conclusive.

Homeopathy is a 200-year-old system of medicine that uses pills or medicinal drops made from diluted extracts of herbs and other substances. Developed by German physician Samuel Hahnemann, homeopathy is based on two main principles. The first states that a substance that can cause certain symptoms when given to a healthy person can cure those same symptoms in someone who is sick. The second ...

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