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Alternative Medicines

Alternative medicine is a upcoming concept in today's world though it was a part of the medicines from time immemorial. This is also said to be a controversial term which covers practices which are not followed in the medical methods. Some of these includes homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, and herbal medicine. The concept of alternative medicine is defined as a "every available approach to healing that does not fall within the realm of conventional medicine". The alternative medicinal practices are based in belief systems of the individuals and are not derived from modern science. This is said to be incorporated in the spiritual, metaphysical, untested practices, pre-modern medical traditions or religious underpinnings or newly developed approaches to healing. The concept of alternative medical approach was though untested,it is presently shown to be safe and effective. There are chances that this method will be adopted by conventional practitioners and thus it will not longer considered "alternative".

Presently "Alternative medicine" is also categorized together with complementary medicine and is know known as Complementary and alternative medicine or CAM. There are a lot of people who utilize mainstream medicine for the diagnosis of the disease as well as the basic information. But they turn to alternative medicine for what they consider as a health-enhancing measures. The studies have indicated that most of the people use alternative approaches in relation with conventional medicine.

According to Ernst "about half the general population in developed countries use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)". There has been a survey which was released in May 2004 by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and it was found out that in the year 2002, 36% of Americans used some form of alternative therapy in the past 12 months and 50% in a lifetime. This category includes yoga, meditation, herbal treatments and the Atkins diet.

There has been a lot of criticism of the alternative medicines. It has been stated that there are cases where a person is hurt or killed due to the avoidance of conventional medicine. But again people who believe in alternative medicine have countered that iatrogenesis is a major cause of death and injury. Deaths have been reported, due to the use of alternative medicines such as colloidal silver. There are various socio-cultural as well as psychological reasons for which a large number of people use the alternative medicines. Some of the Socio-cultural reasons include: vigorous marketing of extravagant claims by the "alternative" medical community, inadequate media scrutiny and attacking critics, the low level of scientific literacy among the public at large, an increase in anti-intellectualism and anti scientific attitudes riding on the coattails of new age mysticism,increasing social malaise (conspiracy theories) and mistrust of traditional authority figures some of which includes the the anti doctor backlash, dislike of the delivery methods of scientific biomedicine.

Some of the Psychological reasons include the placebo effect, demand characteristics which includes the obligation to respond in kind when someone does them a good turn, he will to believe, self-serving biases that help maintain self-esteem and promote harmonious social functioning and various others.

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