Holistic & Alternative Medicine

National Library of Medicine classifies alternative medicine under the term Complementary Therapies.

This is defined as therapeutic practices which are not currently considered an integral part of conventional allopathic medical practice. They may lack biomedical explanations but as they become better researched some, such as physical therapy, diet, and acupuncture, become widely accepted whereas others, such as humors or radium therapy, quietly fade away, yet are important historical footnotes.

Therapies are termed as Complementary when used in addition to conventional treatments and as Alternative when used instead of conventional treatment.

In 1796 Edward Jenner successfully experimented with cowpox vaccinations to prevent smallpox. He had noticed that milkmaids who developed the milder cowpox never caught smallpox, a debilitating and often deadly disease. Then, as now, people were scared of vaccinations. This 1802 cartoon illustrates that fear, showing cows growing out of their bodies after vaccination.

Europeans were dissecting human bodies, in order to discover how they worked, earlier than anywhere in the world. In the process, they acquired a minute understanding of the bodies’ systems—circulatory, skeletal, muscular, and nervous. This led to thinking of the body as a machine, with fixable and replaceable parts, rather than as a whole entity. Vast anatomical knowledge, along with an understanding of microbes as disease vectors, gave western biomedicine tremendous confidence that they would eventually be able to cure all disease.

Your body has 5 pounds of living stuff in it that is not you—microbes of all shapes and sizes: bacteria, viruses, and fungi (more than 10,000 species)! The human body can be visualized as an entire ecosystem, a microcosmos. We are hardly one entity at all, but a community of organisms working together toward their mutual survival. In fact, most of the microorganisms on our skin and in our guts are good for us—we couldn’t survive without them. Here’s more: You May Not Know About One of the Most Important Organs in Your Body

Indigenous peoples around the globe did not know about viruses and bacteria, or the germ theory of disease. However, they were just as interested as were Europeans in the ways to cure sickness. Natives developed complex spiritual ceremonies involving herbs, sweats, dancing, prayers, visitations by Gods, and chanting, often with the whole community attending, to help individuals recover from illness and disease.