Exploring Alternative Medicine
By Dr. Liberty Santos

People nowadays seem to have a growing fascination about alternative medicine. What is it, they ask? Some have seen them on television, read about them in the newspapers, or was told about them by relatives who had treatments from an alternative practitioner.

Why this growing interest?  Are people really becoming more concerned and educated about their bodies and their health? Is mainstream medicine not effective or adequate enough to address their needs? Why does it appeal to people? Why not settle for the “pop a pill” mentality? Surely nothing beats the expediency of just taking a drug to cure your illness?

We have a growing number of people complaining of lack of energy; and a host of complaints difficult to explain, such as allergies, headaches, excessive fatigue, various digestive symptoms, various aches and pains, respiratory complaints, and varying emotional conditions such as depression and anxiety. Taking a look around, it seems like the more modern our lifestyles become, the more difficult the diseases we encounter.  Several years ago, you see chronic ailments mostly in the elderly, but nowadays we hear of young women with breast cancer, kids on antidepressants or drugs for mood disorders, childhood cancers, young men with heart problems or young adults with arthritic pains and countless other illnesses we barely heard of before.

We can understand this to mean that we are now at an age where science has provided us with the modern tools of diagnosis that detects the illness early, but it could also very well be a direct result or reflection of the way we live our lives these days.

With longer lifespan and better control of infections, the need arises now of managing health in the face of so much lifestyle changes and its resultant effects. These include, of course, poor diet, the chemicals in our food, lack of exercise, vices we enjoy, pollution in our environment, stress we fail to manage and the habits too ingrained in our system, which in the long run gives rise to chronic illnesses.

PREVENTABLE ILLNESSES

Studies have shown that a great percentage of chronic illnesses are preventable through lifestyle modification. This however challenges us to open our minds to becoming conscious and actively involved with our bodies to maintain health. 
Mainstream or conventional medicine as we know it, is still the best when it comes to emergency medicine, trauma care, control of infectious diseases and surgical interventions. The deficiency, however, is in managing long-term illnesses and preventing them from happening in the first place. People perceive mainstream medicine to be predominantly mechanistic and technically oriented and alternative medicine comes across as more holistic and encompassing approach.

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