What Exactly is Alternative Medicine?

Alternative medicine is made up of a rich array of techniques and therapies that are, for the most part, the majority of the public. These techniques serve as an "alternative" to what most people use for health care, western medicine.

According to David M. Eisenberg, M.D. of Harvard Medical School, alternative medicines are "medical interventions not taught widely at U.S. medical schools or generally available at U.S. hospitals. The term alternative medicine can also be considered a code word for a series of significant series and challenges occurring within the American health care system today including the following:

The realization that conventional biomedicine (i.e. antibiotics, prescription drugs, invasive surgery, chemotherapy) cannot solve all of America's health problems.
The growing acceptance that health is not simply the "absence of disease" and involves more than just the physical body.
The growing body of research, as well as public opinion, that states that alternative medicine is often more effective, economical, and less invasive and harmful than conventional medicine.
The growing number of informed health care consumers who are open to trying alternative medical treatments and demanding to be treated as a person-not as a diagnosis-by their health care practitioners.

In trying to determine what exactly alternative medicine is, one must remember that the term alternative medicine is very subjective and it means very different things to different people. Hence, there really is no simple definition for alernative medicine as a whole that will satisfy everyone. Furthermore, alternative therapies range so much in their goals, methods, common cures and applications, that it is very difficult to make one gereralized statement that covers all of the different therapies. However, we must do our best to explain the alternative medicine as succintly and as accurately as possible.

Some information provided by:
http://www.healthy.net/clinic/therapy/index.shtml