Considering the Alternative

Would you go to yoga class to prevent heartburn? See a chiropractor for a sore throat? If your joints ache, would you talk to a nutrition counselor?

Many Americans are beginning to use these integrative health options but it is a relatively recent development. Integrative medicine is a new buzz word, and physicians who practice it are willing, along with their patients, to explore the options of massage, chiropractic, acupuncture and yoga as viable ways to treat chronic medical conditions.

I recently read a fascinating article on TheAtlantic.com about the history of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). When it was started in the early 1990’s with a $50 million budget, it actually had a different name: National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).  At that time it was dedicated to studying just about every treatment that didn’t involve pharmaceuticals or surgery. Now it studies only those treatments it considers able to be studied and explained scientifically, and leaves homeopathy, magnetic therapy, and energy healing to linger in the never-never land of alternative. Some, including magnetic therapy, they have just decided to call quackery or at best placebo effects.

I say, not so fast.  Complementary? Integrative? Alternative?

The website for NCCIH says this:

• If a non-mainstream practice is used together with conventional medicine, it’s considered “complementary.”
• If a non-mainstream practice is used in place of conventional medicine, it’s considered “alternative.”
• Furthermore, NCCIH generally uses the term “complementary health approaches” when we discuss practices and products of non-mainstream origin. We use “integrative health” when we talk about incorporating complementary approaches into mainstream health care.

What complementary medicine is today was not always so. Learn more.

But what is complementary today was not always so. Sometimes they were called alternative, and sometimes they are mainstream in other cultures, just not the western world.

• In 1966 the American Medical Association (AMA) labeled chiropractic an “unscientific cult” and yet today chiropractic is covered by most health insurance to some degree, and doctors and chiropractors work more comfortably with one another.
• In India, home of over 1 billion people, yoga is used as a medical treatment and has been for thousands of years, yet in the USA it is just considered a new way to get some exercise.
• Even non-mainstream practices such as acupuncture, aromatherapy, and healing touch are being used in some hospitals, when only a few years ago that would have been laughed at.

So, I ask, are these complementary treatments such as aromatherapy really so much more able to be scientifically explained than magnetic therapy? No, of course not and even less so.  However, the results are indisputable, unless you have other reasons to dislike them.

The purpose of this blog post is to give you some food for thought. On a final note, I have to address this quote from The Atlantic article.

Some thought the NCCAM’s work was too far outside the mainstream. “My problem was that they were funding studies on things like distance healing and putting magnets in your mattress to improve arthritis,” Paul Offit, the chief of the infectious-disease division at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, recently told me. “There’s no way that ever could have worked. The iron in your blood is not magnetizable. (sic);”  For some research on the topic, click here: http://www.avivopur.com/uv-magnetic-study/

To your health—

–LeAnn Lyon
Founder & President of aVivoPur.com

Resources:

https://nccih.nih.gov/health/integrative-health

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/the-evolution-of-alternative-medicine/396458/

About LeAnn

Nearly 20 years ago LeAnn Lyon faced knee surgery and was told she would need knee replacements before her children would even graduate high school. She decided this was unacceptable. Now a leading expert in magnetic therapy and nutritional supplements, she and her husband have founded aVivoPur.com to make natural and effective options available to everyone at reasonable prices.