Trends in Alternative Medicine
Overview
"Alternative medicine" may be defined as medicine that is different from "conventional" treatment. These treatments are not based on "modern" concepts of disease. The Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines alternative, or "complementary," medicine as "those treatments not taught widely in medical schools, not generally used in hospitals, and not usually reimbursed by insurance." With developments in the last years of the 1900s, this definition will probably change.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, the number of various practitioners of alternative medicine had increased in Western Europe and the United States. It is estimated that half of the U.S. population may go to an alternative practitioner. This figure does not reflect the number of individuals who venture into self-help practices.
One factor in the development of the alternative medicine movement was the emerging idea of self-help, which perhaps came about as a reaction to the image of practitioners of Western medicine as doctors who dehumanize patients and who are concerned only with disease and not about the prevention of pain or illness. In the West in the 1960s the movement dubbed "counterculture" questioned all kinds of traditions, including medicine.
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