Western Views of Non-Traditional Medicines Essay -- Exploratory Essays

If you bye into any pharmacy, grocery store, or natural foods store, you cannot avoid the shelves and displays of ersatz remedies and treatments. Promises of fewer aches and pains, clearer skin, slower aging, better digestion, and more harmonious body functions are crocked on store w onlys and across bottle labels with many, often green, pills and liquids. Ginseng, Echinacea, acupuncture, reflexology, antioxidants, Vitamin A, B, C, E... have all become a familiar part of our cultures vocabulary, and for many, a part of their health regime. The allure of treatments that are as simple as a arrangement of plants or are based on a well-loved substance deal garlic are obvious, particularly in an cultural environment where not only medical labels but most food labels seem to be written in a different language, and where people are taught that apprehension and medicine know more about them than they could ever know or render about themselves(Beinfield, 24). A full-page advertisement in the New York measure for the Oxford HMO is an insightful illustration of both public demand of alternative treatments and its current misgivings about Western medical care. In the first paragraph, Oxford says it has redesigned its platform to take on a more physician-responsive, patient-centered approach. Another section begins with the heading, ersatz medicament. The Choice is Yours. It goes on to state, A third of the people we serve already use alternative therapies. Now they have access to the first credentialed profit of alternative care practitioners. It includes acupuncturists, chiropractors, massage therapists and nutritionists, to name a few... In handed-down health care, specialty care has been focused more on free treatmen... ... New York Times. Tuesday, April 1, 1997. * Website on Chinese Medicine www.hanwei.com/culture/medic.htm * Stix, Gary. Probing Medicines outermost Reaches. Scientific American. October 1996. * Website on Alternative Medicine www.chin aplus.com * Marshall, Eliot. The Politics of Alternative Medicine. Science. Vol. 265. Sept. 30, 1994. * Website on Chinese Medicine www.europa.com * Finkelstein, Katherine Eban. Insuring Children Health Care Reform Writ Small. The Nation. process 3, 1997. * Eisenberg, M.D., David, with Thomas Lee Wright. Encounters with Qi Exploring Chinese Medicine. 1985, New York, W.W. Norton and Company. * Caudill, M.D., Ph.D., Margaret A.. Foreward, The Web that has No Weaver Understanding Chinese Medicine. Ted Kaptchuk, O.M.D.. 1983, New York, Congdon and Weed. * Website on Chinese Medicinewww.ccchome.com