Natural Health Care

Traditional western medicine has been the predominant form of health care in the United States for over a century now, but more and more people are discovering alternative methods of curing disease and staying healthy.

More and more people have been spending more and more money on alternative medicine, and more and more time researching what such health care alternatives have to offer. One of the largest, most interesting facets of alternative medicine is popularly known as complementary health care of complementary medicine.

Complimentary health care refers to a broad variety of aids, counseling and approaches to proper health care. These forms of assistance are meant to compliment the skills and advances of traditional medicine, while still using natural and alternative approaches. Thus, complementary medicine is able to take advantage of the best of both worlds, by combining the important advances science has made and the traditional remedies that have been used for so many centuries.

That means that using alternative medicine and natural healing techniques does not mean you give up important screening tools like MRI’s, CAT scans and other important tests. Alternative medicine is then free to do what it does best, and what traditional medicine often does poorly. For instance, traditional western medicine often does a fairly poor job at helping people with their day to day needs and managing their emotional and spiritual reactions to illness.

Providers of complementary health care are often able to connect to their patients on many different levels. In order to be effective, these health care providers need to make a spiritual and emotional connection with their patients, not merely concentrate on their physical needs.

Since most alternative health care providers do not have the training or knowledge to intervene in emergency situations, much of alternative medicine is focused on preventing health problems from occurring, or using natural treatments to help those conditions that do occur.

Alternative medicine is also good at getting to the root cause of health problems, and treating the problems where they arise. This means that alternative health care providers have to be very good at spotting potential signs of illness, often before their patients even know there is a problem. It is important for these alternative health care providers to be very vigilant and attentive to detail.

A good complementary health care provider will be capable of both making sound medical decisions based on the history of the patient, while at the same time being able to address the complex emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual aspects of that same patient. This obviously takes a special kind of health care provider, and the worlds of alternative, natural and complementary health care often contain some of the best and most highly qualified doctors, nurses and other health care practitioners.

The field of complementary health care represents an important coming together of the worlds of alternative, natural and traditional health care. It represents both the fact that alternative practitioners understand the importance of traditional medicine, and the fact that traditional medicine is able to learn and grow from alternative and traditional practices.