David Winston, RH(AHG), and Steven Maimes
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 It is important to understand that traditional herbal medicine differs in theory and practice from western medicine. In traditional herbal medical systems, medicines (primarily herbal) often were seen as correcting internal disharmonies rather than simply targeting symptoms as in western medicine. Internal disharmonies were understood as subjective and often described in concepts such as yin and yang, the doshas, and the humors— terms that were widely understood among the general population. |
Rainer W. Bussmann and Douglas Sharon
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 It is an alternative to western medicine and is strongly linked to religious beliefs and practices of indigenous cultures. Medicinal plant lore or herbal medicine is a major component of Traditional Medicine.
In Latin American countries, herbal medicine is deeply rooted, practiced extensively by indigenous groups, and frequently used by a broad cross-section of the larger society. Often it is an economically inevitable alternative to expensive western medicine. |
David Winston, RH(AHG), and Steven Maimes
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| HEALING THEORY: WESTERN AND EASTERN
Orthodox western medicine teaches that to cure a disease, you need to identify the root cause and eliminate it. This is commonly known as the "doctrine of a specific etiology of disease."
Western medicine is very effective for treating people with many infectious diseases, life-threatening illnesses, and traumatic injuries. |
Roberta Bivins
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 As these terms passed from Chinese to Japanese to Dutch to Latin, they lost the polysemic flexibility of their original language, and hardened into the increasingly rigid language of western medicine. The final translations were made even more brittle, as Ten Rhyne complained, by his interpreters' 'inexperience and hmited vocabulary in Dutch'. Thus, he was driven to 'omit much that was written in Chinese in the original documents'. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 One consensus favors drugs as the cure, the other favors food," he explains; western medicine, for the most part, has chosen drugs. As he sees it, we got it wrong.
I agree. However, over the last couple of decades there has been some movement in the West toward recognizing the importance of nutrition to health. That is a development to be welcomed. And I much admire all the pioneers who have dared to stand up to the establishment. Their work has nourished my own, and although we may disagree on some fine points, for the most part we represent different paths up the same mountain. |
Marshall Editions
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 For severe cases of diabetes, and particularly Type 2 diabetes, Chinese medicine treatment can be integrated with western medicine, but it is not a replacement for conventional medication, and you may also need to use insulin. Consult your doctor before integrating treatments.
• Formula one: This can be used to treat either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes. Symptoms of dryness in the mouth and on the tongue, thirst, frequent urination, dizziness, and vertigo are usually diagnosed as an insufficiency of kidney yin. |
| For long-term high blood pressure, acupuncture may be used to complement western medicine treatment. Acupuncture may also be helpful in reducing headache, dizziness, improving the quality of sleep, and reducing stress. Regular treatments once a week for a few months or longer may be recommended by a practitioner.
Acupressure: Use your fingertip to apply medium pressure to the Tai Yang point, situated in the depression at the temple, one finger behind the lateral end of the eyebrow and eyelid. |
| Referral to a western medicine doctor for an examination and diagnosis of the prime causes of symptoms is very helpful, as traditional Chinese medicine can then be used in a complementary manner.
Herbs: Combine the ingredients of either of the herbal remedies below in a ceramic pot. Add 3 cups of water, bring to the boil, and simmer for 30 minutes. The herbs listed are available from Chinese herbalists or online.
• To treat excessive heartburn: This is as an acute condition of heartburn and is usually due to improper diet and irregular eating patterns, or a cold or fever. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 After cancer treatments nearly kill them, they reach out for alternatives
When cancer patients finally make that decision to embrace alternative medicine, they often do so in a near-death state because they have been so utterly harmed by the treatments espoused by conventional, western medicine. Then, even more frustratingly, they begin to take a few herbs or experience some kind of alternative treatment and end up dying from organ failure caused by the toxic chemotherapy given to them by their conventional medical doctors. That is why I tell people you have to make a choice sooner. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Western medicine, on the other hand, has a very different mindset. western medicine believes that the patient is not in charge; rather, it is the doctor who in control of any healing that takes place. western medicine attempts to take over the chemistry of the body and override the body’s natural balance. For example, the use of chemotherapy attempts to override and even destroy the body’s immune system as an acceptable side effect of attacking cancerous tumors throughout the body. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| In fact, in those cases it is completely inaccurate because even though you may only have six months to live based on his experience with western medicine, that doctor cannot tell you how long you might live under some other system of medicine. You might live ten years or even a normal lifetime if you walk out of that office and go to a different system of medicine where the outcomes are entirely different and universally more positive.
It does not mean that the oncologists are lying to you. In fact, they may be telling the truth about what they observe in their own clinic. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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Mushrooms
While mushrooms have been used medicinally in Eastern medicine for eons, western medicine is now beginning to catch up as the healing properties of mushrooms are beginning to be demonstrated scientifically. The three specific types with the greatest health benefits are Maitake, Shiitake, and Reishi. According to Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D., all three have powerful effects on the immune system, and all three act as medicine. |
Richard Bartlett
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 I believe that the concepts and practices of our western medicine system have taken on an importance in our subconscious mind-set equal to that of a mythology. Anything so ingrained into our awareness becomes part of the foundation of our reality. In order to change the expected outcomes in health or disease, you have to move outside the prefabricated box that is ensouled by that set of expectations. To achieve a new or different outcome, you must move into a state of non-consensus reality where the rules of the game may not be so rigidly defined. |
Roberta Bivins
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| Resentment of such imperial officiousness, however, did not blind Indians to the benefits of some forms and aspects of western medicine, or to its close association with the increasingly powerful touchstones of 'modernity' and 'scientificity'.
Could this tension—between the Janus faces of colonial medicine as imposed and yet desired, exotically attractive and yet dangerously foreign—help to explain what contemporaries saw as an Indian enthusiasm for western medical alternatives? |
| He had a stake in the knowledge and structures of western medicine, and was engaged in the medical debates of the day.
Busschof encountered Ten Rhyne as the latter passed through Batavia on his way to a new posting as the medical officer of the Dutch trading mission in Japan. Once in Japan, Ten Rhyne was both observer and observed; as the sole representatives of European culture, the Dutch merchants and their entourage were studied and questioned, particularly about Western natural philosophy (what we would call science), technology, and medicine. |
| Committee members also made a point of noting the deep divisions in western medicine, and in particular commented extensively on those between homeopaths and allopaths, and between those who supported laboratory methods and those who privileged, instead, clinical experience and observation in diagnosis.
Several members of the committee also critiqued the imperial tendency towards the purely extractive study of indigenous medicine:
There are many well-meaning persons... |
| By the second half of the nineteenth century, orthodox western medicine was recognized by its practitioners, sponsors, and consumers as a fundamental part of the imperial enterprise and encounter. Clearly, this close association did not necessarily render scientific medicine well liked or popular with the Indian masses. To a greater or lesser extent, the mandates of this medical system were imposed willy-nilly upon an unwilling or unconvinced population. |
| If orthodoxy in medicine is in part determined by the durability and degree of acceptance achieved by any particular medical idea, then this picture—though to us strange and exotic—is a portrait of'orthodox western medicine'. It certainly endured unchallenged for far longer than biomedicine, a mere upstart with a scant century of widespread use and acceptance to its credit. |
Dr Ron Roberts
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 One respected researcher, Dr James Wright, PhD, has practised traditional western medicine for over 35 years. He is recognised for his acceptance and recommendation of hypnotherapy, acupuncture, hydrotherapy, spinal manipulation, vitamin and mineral therapy and other 'fringe' modalities. Dr Wright writes: 'My evaluation indicates that ingesting small negative ions can provide significant health benefits'.
Air purifiers
Fan-forced air purifiers usually contain three-way activated carbon (charcoal) filters to purify the atmosphere. |
Ron Garner
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 Conventional western medicine treats disease conditions or symptoms. It does not treat the basic causes of disease, the reasons why health begins to degenerate in the first place.
The "chasing the disease" approach simply doesn't work in the long run because it can't! If you don't address the cause of a problem, it will just surface again later. It may arise in a different form, or it may come back in the same form but be much more serious. |
Marshall Editions
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| Historically, Chinese medicine descriptions of diabetes are much the same as those of western medicine. Diabetes occurs most commonly in those who have a deficiency of yin. It is often caused by improper diet, emotional disturbance, stress, and exhaustion.
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Herbs: The herbs listed can be found in Chinese herbal stores. Caution: The suggested formulas are best used after consulting with a Chinese medicine doctor. |
Thomson Healthcare, Inc.
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 Yang DJ, Tinnitus treated with combined traditional Chinese medicine and western medicine. Chung Hsi I Chieh Ho Tsa Chih, 9:270-1,259-60, 1989 May. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
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 Doctors and shamans from Asia to Europe to the Americas used instruments as varied as sharpened sticks, shark's teeth, and miniature bows and arrows to bleed their patients.
In western medicine, the practice was derived from the thinking of the Greek physician Galen, who practiced the theory of the four humours—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. According to Galen and his intellectual descendants, all illness resulted from an imbalance of the four humours, and it was the doctor's job to balance those fluids through fasting, purging, and bloodletting. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 But good as it is with acute conditions, western medicine is very bad at what are called chronic conditions. And it is woefully, pathetically incompetent when it comes to prevention. Chronic conditions are what might be called ongoing states of unwellness that are not emergencies, but last for months, years, or lifetimes. They can progress into acute emergencies, but are, for the most part, the sicknesses and conditions we live with, in varying degrees of severity. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Chinese medicine has the longest history, and the most practical application, of any system of medicine in the world, outdating western medicine by about 3800 years. In China, doctors were practicing relatively advanced medicine before the birth of Christ. western medicine, in response, dismisses everything under Chinese medicine, ignoring the long history of safe and effective use of Chinese herbs, acupuncture, and other philosophies espoused by Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Chinese medicine is not limited to China, by the way. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 It's a difficult question, which, at its heart, involves establishing the boundary—what is inside and what is outside—of western medicine. The problem is akin to determining, and to maintaining, a political border. There have been frequent wars in medicine's history, and occasional peace treaties, in either case altering a hitherto unquestioned border. What was on one side is now on the other. Maybe the best solution to our problem is to think of what is inside the boundary as the routine practice of medicine, which we would call "MD medicine. |
| And it is bizarre; the very thought of a world without western medicine is difficult to imagine—much more so than one might expect. At this point, it is best to consider our thought experiment as a form of controlled speculation which might expose and inform our own conceptual apparatus. The thought experiment is not real, but no more or less than any work of imagination, or for that matter, any work that is inherently conceptual. We would hope not only for theoretical insight, but also that this thought experiment might, for example, inform the debate on public policy. |
| I was trying to imagine what the world would look like without western medicine. Gone would be primary care physicians, surgeons, psychiatry—all the various medical specialties. There would be no treatment for trauma, nor fractures. Sufferers from the common cold would need to recover without their physician's help. There would be no blood transfusions or organ transplants, nor would there be emergency or critical care of any sort. Pharmaceutical companies would be gone, as would the drugs they manufacture—as would the placebo effects from those drugs! |
Bill Sardi
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 Here's western medicine with its horrible side effects and here's this holistic, gentle nutritionist who acts so concerned.".
"It wasn't just the money they took," she said, "// was the time. He (my husband) may have lived longer — or achieved a remission — had he chosen conventional medical care."
But the cancer doctor quoted in the article conceded that "our track record with this kind of tumor is pretty dismal." There is little evidence that conventional treatment would have offered this patient more than a couple of extra months of life, and at what cost? |
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