The line between conventional and alternative medicine is imprecise and frequently
changing. For example, is the use of megavitamins or diet regimes to treat disease
considered medicine, a lifestyle change, or both? Can having your pain lessened by
massage be considered a medical therapy? How should spiritual healing and
prayer—some of the oldest, most widely used, and least studied traditional
approaches—be classified? Although the terms alternative or complementary are fre-
quently used, in some instances they represent the primary treatment for an individ-
ual. Thus, conventional medicine sometimes assumes a secondary role and actually
becomes a complement to the primary treatment plan.
Conventional Medicine
Conventional Western medicine is only about 200 years old. It is founded on the philo-
sophical beliefs of René Descartes (1596–1650), who regarded the mind and body as
separate, and on Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) principles of physics, which view the
universe as a large mechanical clock where everything operates in a linear, sequential
form. This mechanistic perspective of medicine views the human body as a series of
body parts. It also is a “reductionist” approach in which the person is converted into
increasingly smaller components: systems, organs, cells, and biochemicals. Taking that
idea further, people are reduced to patients, patients are reduced to bodies, and bodies
are reduced to machines. Health is viewed as the absence of disease—in other words,
nothing broken at the present time. The focus of sick care is on the symptoms of dys-
function. Doctors are trained to fix or repair broken parts through the use of drugs,
radiation, surgery, or replacement of body parts. This approach is aggressive and mili-
tant, with physicians in a war against disease, and a take-no-prisoners attitude. Both
consumers and practitioners of biomedicine believe it is better to do something rather
than wait and see whether the body’s natural processes resolve the problem, and
attack the disease directly by medication or surgery rather than try to build up the per-
son’s resistance and ability to overcome the disease.
Biomedicine views the person primarily as a physical body, with the mind and spirit
being separate and secondary, or at times, even irrelevant. It is powerful medicine in
that it has virtually eliminated some infectious diseases such as smallpox and polio.
As a “rescue” medicine, the biomedical approach is wonderful. It is highly effective
in emergencies, traumatic injuries, bacterial infections, and some highly sophisti-
cated surgeries. In these cases, treatment is fast, aggressive, and goal-oriented, with
the responsibility for cure falling on the practitioner. The priority of intervention is
on opposing and suppressing the symptoms of illness. This mindset can be seen in
many medications with countering prefixes such as “an” or “anti”—analgesics,
anesthetics, anti-inflammatories, antipyretics, and so on. Because conventional med-
icine is preoccupied with parts and symptoms and not with whole working systems
CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE ALL ABOUT? 7
