ALTERNATIVE COMPLEMENTARY
MEDICINE'S FUTURE

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Corporate takeover of the soul of healthcare

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Internet leading healthcare revolution

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Larry King

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Tibetan medicine

Alternative Medicine - Scientific and Proven

The politics of medicine are in many ways similar to any other politics. The "Golden Rule" applies: He who has the gold, makes the rules. Power and money are the motivating factors underlying many of the decisions and laws in our society. However, medical politics in the United States involves another factor - medical dogma.

Medical dogma can best be defined as a system of thought which declares that there is one, and only one, system of medicine or science. The system is composed of, and limited to, medical doctors, their support staff, their surgical procedures, their recommended pharmaceutical drugs, their portion of the insurance industry, and of course, their diagnostic procedures and standard treatments.

We are now in the midst of an important medical revolution. Medical dogma is under attack from a variety of sources and "medicine" as we once knew it is rapidly changing. From the Holistic side of the coin we see that medicine is not one method, not one system, and we must treat all aspects of Self - body, mind and soul - in order to fully heal. From the Conventional side, we're aware that technology and modern medicine has not solved all of our health care problems.

While the conventional side loudly complains that alternative medicine is not "scientific" and not "proven," has anyone stopped to ask if conventional medicine is indeed scientific? In an interview with Burton Goldberg, the founder and publisher of alternativemedicine.com (books, magazine and Web site), medical historian Harris L. Coulter, Ph.D., author of the landmark four-volume history of Western medicine called Divided Legacy, argues convincingly that it is not.

"Doctors of this persuasion accept a dogma on faith and impose it on their patients, until it's proved wrong or dangerous by the next generation. They get carried away by abstract ideas and forget the living patients. As a result, the diagnosis is not directly connected to the remedy; the link is more a matter of guesswork than science. This approach, says Dr. Coulter, is "inherently imprecise, approximate, and unstable - it's a dogma of authority, not science." Even if an approach hardly works at all, it's kept on the books because the theory says it's good "science.""

Medical doctors have long dominated the medical arena in the West, and they are not likely to give up their power and control without a good fight. Many are loathe to accept what they cannot "scientifically prove," and their scientific methods, double-blind, randomized, single element, placebo-controlled studies are not well-suited for a holistic, individualized approached to healing.

Fortunately, our understanding of medicine has changed significantly in the past fifty years. At one time, treatment options such as Chinese medicine, naturopathic medicine, homeopathy, medicinal plant therapies, and other "alternative therapies" were totally unknown to many Americans. With our sharpened awareness, and global access to such information, the concepts of many of these therapies which were once considered "quackery" now seem plausible, and acceptable by mainstream society in the West.

from the Editorial pages of Alternative Medicine Magazine by Burton Goldberg http://altmedicine.about.com/health/altmedicine/altmedicine/lilbrary/weekly/mcurrent.htm