Rating Alternative Medicine - 1

From acupuncture to aromatherapy: what works—and what doesn’t

Americans spend billions of dollars every year on a wide variety of alternative therapies—often abandoning treatments, recommended by their regular doctors or supplementing prescribed therapies with a regimen that the medical establishment rejects or ridicules. They’re exploring alternative medicine not only to fight illness, but also in the hopes of preventing disease before it starts. And alternative practitioners are gaining credibility, in part, because “conventional” doctors so often seem to change their minds about the efficacy of longstanding treatment and drugs. Theories and practices that were presented as sacrosanct and indisputable often turn out to be harmful in the long run.

As a practicing M.D. who belongs to the medical establishment, he understanding the hunger for other options and have reviewed the leading alternative therapies. Here’s what you should know about seven of the most popular:

Acupuncture

I know one story when my friend visited in China. He witnessed an open-heart operation where the patient, a woman in her late 20s was anesthetized solely with acupuncture. He was apprehensive, to say the least, as the surgeon began to cut through her breastbone with an electric buzz saw. After her chest was split in two, it was spread apart with a large clamp to expose the heart. The repair of the diseased valve took about 30 minutes, after which the breastbone was sewn together with steel sutures, the skin was closed, and the patient was wheeled out of the operating room-still awake!

As a cardiologist, he had attended scores of such heart operations, but he had never seen anything like this. He would never have believed anyone could remain wide awake, let alone smile, through such and ordeal.