Alternative Therapies becoming More Popular

Today more and more people are turning to Alternative therapies as an addition or option to conventional medicine.
It should however be noted that alternative therapies are not a substitute for conventional medicine and you should continue to seek medical advice and treatment from your medical practitioner/doctor.

Both conventional medicine and alternative therapies have their benefits and should be used in conjunction with each other. Normally (from my experience) when we visit our local doctor or medical practitioner they tend to ask what is wrong and then prescribe antibiotcs or whatever to treat the symptom and in lots of cases don’t really consider what is causing this symptom. This is presumably better than no treatment at all but may not be the answer to our problem.

I am often asked what is holistic … I think if we put a W in front of it and change the word to Wholistic then we think of the word “Whole” and that is exactly what holistic therapies are all about the Whole person “for if we need to find the
cure we must look beyond the symptoms”.

There is no effect without a cause and similarly there is no illness without a cause. When we visit an Holistic practitioner they should take a case study and they will or should look at anything and everything that can be that “cause”.

They will consider our diet and eating habits, what exercise we do, whether we drink or smoke, our work and family situations to ascertain if they are causing any stress (bearing in mind that a lot of illnesses are stress related). They will
consider past illnesses, falls or bumps and anything at all that could relate to our present condition. In effect they are looking for the cause of our condition ... and oh yes if we have a headache we can take an asprin or paracetamol and the headache may go … for a while. What we have done here is treat the symptom and the relief may be short lived as the cause may not have been corrected. The cause of the headache for instance may be as simple as spending too long if front of a computer or maybe our eyesight has deteriorated and we need spectacles and of course the paracetamol or whatever may relieve the pain for a while but it usually returns when the effect of the pain killer has worn off. We can continue to treat the symptom which will continue to return until we have dealt with the cause of our problem and  this is what the Holistic practitioner aims to acheive.

There is a saying (I believe by Paracelus the great 16th century physician) which is very true and a good simile “Those who merely treat the effects of a disease (and not the cause) are like those who imagine they can drive away the winter by brushing the snow from the door”

Alternative Health Books