The Complementary And Alternetive Medicine System
Introduction
“The World Health Organization at its 1978
international conference held in the Soviet Union produced the Alma-Ata Health
Declaration, which was designed to serve governments as a basis for planning
health care that would reach people at all levels of society. The declaration
reaffirmed that “health, which is a state of complete physical, mental and
social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, is a
fundamental human right and that the attainment of the highest possible level
of health is a most important world-wide social goal whose realization requires
the action of many other social and economic sectors in addition to the health
sector.” In its widest form the practice of medicine, that is to say the
promotion and care of health, is concerned with this ideal.”
In the past decade we have seen an increased awareness of
complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in both public and governmental
sectors. What today is called alternative medicine covers a wide range of disciplines,
most of which are guided by the “healing model” of holistic medicine, which
emphasizes the complex interplay between multiple factors: biochemical,
environmental, psychological, and spiritual, as opposed to the biomedical model
which reduces disease to a disturbance in biochemical process and relies
heavily on the “curative model” of care.
Healthcare providers today are faced with challenging
issues of health-promotion, disease prevention and management of chronic
illnesses for which conventional medicine has offered only limited success. An
increasingly knowledgeable patient population is now fueling the CAM movement
by seeking alternatives to traditional treatments. The use of CAM modalities by Americans
between 1990 and 1997 increased from 34% to 42% of the general population. In
addition, the total number of visits to CAM providers increasedfrom 427 million
to 629 million within this same time period. This number exceeds the total
visits to all primary care physicians combined (386 million) in 1997.
Just a decade ago, alternative therapies were readily
dismissed by physicians as fringe medicine, however today CAM is now beginning
to earn attention and academic stature. The growing number of CAM clinics
affiliated with hospitals, the expansion of CAM courses within academic medical
education, and the increase in CAM benefits offered by insurers offer clear
evidence of this trend.
The costs of CAM approaches and their potential risks and
benefits provide a public health rationale for subjecting them to critical
appraisal. In pursuit of this vision, the US Congress authorized in 1998 the
establishment of a new component of the National Institutes of Health—the
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (“NCCAM”)—with a
mandate to conduct CAM research, train CAM investigators, and disseminate
authoritative information to practitioners and the public. That same year, the
Journal of the American Medical Assoc. (JAMA) published a series of scientific
studies in a special issue dedicated to alternative medicine. This was the
first such effort by a mainstream US medical journal and was an attempt to meet
doctors' needs for high-quality scientific information on treatments that more
and more patients are trying.
This book provides wealthy information on the Complementary
and Alternative Medicinal Systems. Chapters on other complementary therapies
such as Aromatherapy, Yoga therapy, Naturopathy etc. are included which gives
knowledge-based advice to the medical fraternity.There is enormous difference
between complementary and alternative medicine system. The prime aim of both
systems is to make healthy people. Without understanding the basic concepts of
these systems there may be a chance for misbelief. Here we tried hard to
explain these concepts.
Dr. Sandip G. Buddhadev
& Mrs. Sheetal S. Buddhadev
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