Medicine; alternative or conventional method?

When people fall ill it is quite obvious that they will see a doctor whereby the conventional medicine method is used. Most people are still not aware that alternative medicine can still be as good. This could be due to not having enough information in order to decide if they can go the alternative or conventional way.

The differences

The conventional method which is a disease based model targets treating symptoms and not the real causes. Focus is on the body parts and not the person as a whole. Schools that teach medicine simply focus on organ departments that do not relate in any way and the doctors simply administer drugs to rescue the situation not to treat or prevent future infections. Despite all these, this method is the best when it comes to drugs used in trauma care or surgery.

The alternative method is based on a prevention model. This means that the method focuses on treating the real underlying issue and not the symptoms. It is a treatment that aims at treating the whole body and it is quite cost effective as compared to the conventional method.

There is a large population of people who are turning to the alternative method. For instance in the United States, one out of three Americans seeks the use of the alternative method. The percentage of alternative medicine seekers increased by forty seven per cent between 1990 and 1997. This was more than the number of those who visited conventional doctors.

As the statistics increase the main question in the health care industry is why is it that most conventional doctors don’t want to recommend the alternative route?

Answers

To answer the question why conventional doctors are not giving information about alternative medicine one needs to know the contributing factors and one is ties with the pharmaceutical industries. How will pharmacists make their profit if their medicine is not being prescribed? The doctor has to prescribe so that the pharmacist can still have some worth.

The pharmaceutical industry also funds medical schools that have shown interest in marketing their products. A good example is Pfizer which offers grants and scholarships to medical schools in the United States of America.

The media also has a stake in all this since it is the medium for advertising medicinal drugs to consumers. The advertisements showing the drugs are a source of income for the media houses. How big is this? It is as big as drug companies spending $ 1.8 billion in 1999 to advertise prescription drugs directly to the consumer. What’s more the people who watched the advertisements went ahead to find out more about the drugs from their doctor. What would the doctor prescribe?

Funding for medical research is usually a lot in order to ensure that the results are in favour of conventional medicine rather than the alternative method. This simply makes the research questionable.

If research on alternative medicine is not funded then the consequences are that it blocks well trained scientists from focusing on the field. It also hinders research projects that are important and most of all it has a negative effect on the research infrastructure.