Non-conventional medicine refers to a variety of treatment methods from sometimes age-old traditions and practices that have emerged around the 19th century, generally before the scientific method.
Non-conventional medicines are for this reason overall considered pseudo-scientific by part of the medical community, but a growing number of doctors are studying them and adding them to their medical practice.
They are also known under the names of alternative medicine, parallel medicine, holistic medicine, traditional medicine, complementary medicine, and natural medicine.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) includes alternative and complementary medicine in traditional medicines.
It states: the terms "alternative medicine" or "complementary medicine" are used interchangeably with the term "traditional medicine" in some countries." They cover a wide range of health care practices that are not part of the traditions of the country and which are not incorporated in their dominant health care system.”
In terms scientific medicine, the concept of alternative medicine seems to imply two concepts of medicine involving two care systems operating independently from the other, with the same degree of efficiency and scientificity: thus, patients have the possibility to choose between two therapeutic methods they can consider as alternative and competing or complementary one to the other. Secondly, the appellation 'soft medicine' seems to consider conventional medicine as a set of aggressive practices.
Alternative medicine considers these practices of care such as substitute, likely to replace a classical and conventional therapeutic approach. Skeptics prefer to talk about pseudo-medicine or pseudo-science to avoid this rhetoric effect.
The term 'holistic' is a reproach to conventional medicine to treat a body, a symptom or a function and not the patient in its entirety, which applies to separate medical specialties but not systematically to medicine in general.
The term "complementary medicine" favours the idea of associating treatments involving "therapeutic philosophies" different but able to cooperate in the interest of the patient.
Number of these medicines find their origin in the Asian traditions (Chinese, Indian) and are related to the philosophies and cultures of these countries. Hence, the term "Western medicine" for conventional medicine, while it also has various origins (including Egyptian and Arab, see the history of medicine) and not only Western, and on the other hand, the Japanese and Chinese dignitaries have widely use "Western medicine." Some unconventional practices may, however, find their origin in the local traditions of the West or even have been developed in a recent period (the case of multiple energy practices).
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