Whole Medical Systems
Alternative medicine is any practice that is put forward as having the healing effects of medicine, but is not based on evidence gathered with the scientific method. It may consist of a wide range of health care practices, products and therapies, using methods of medical diagnosis and treatments which were typically not included in the degree courses of established medical schools teaching medicine, including surgery, in the tradition of the Flexner Report or similar. Examples include homeopathy, Ayurveda, chiropractic and acupuncture.
Complementary medicine is alternative medicine used together with conventional medical treatment in a belief, not proven by using scientific methods, that it "complements" the treatment. CAM is the abbreviation for Complementary and alternative medicine. Integrative medicine (or integrative health) is the combination of the practices and methods of alternative medicine with evidence-based medicine.
The term alternative medicine is used in information issued by public bodies in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Regulation and licensing of alternative medicine and health care providers varies from country to country, and state to state.
Read more about Whole Medical Systems: History - 19th Century Onwards, Examples and Classes, Criticism, Placebo Effect, Efficacy, Appeal, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words medical and/or systems:
“Mark Twain didn’t psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn’t put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.”
—Samuel Fuller (b. 1911)
“Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)