Alternative Health Practices

During the past few decades, there has been an increasing number of people beginning to pay more attention to using Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAMs) such as homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, herbal medicines and Christian faith healing to cure diseases (Macartney and Wahlberg, 2014a, cited in Cant and Sharma, 1999; World Health Organization, 2002). But recently, controversy has centered on whether this is a valid method to treat serious illness instead of conventional medicine. Stoneman et al (2012) claim that complementary and alternative medicine is considered as a more natural and effective approach to treating illness. To combat this, Macartney and Wahlberg (2014b) argue that alternative remedies may not only trigger some uncertain danger to patients but also contribute significantly to consumers purchasing these so called ‘ magical cures’. In order to solve this problem, CAM users should be given more education and modify their mistaken idea about overly trust alternative medicine. Only by doing so can the public do not be deceived by pseudo experts and become the victim of fraud. This paper will argue that Complementary and Alternative Medicine should not be relied to treat serious illness for the reasons of it is untested and unregulated medicine as well as may cause negative effects during the possess of chemotherapy and thirdly for the high costs of treatment.

The first reason why relying on CAM to treat serious illness is irresponsible is that non-conventional medicine not only has potential risks but also is not be well controlled as well. On the one hand, the advocates of alternative healing methods suggest that it is a natural therapy which is more effective and less harmful than traditional medicine. Traditional medicine probably provoke uncertain danger and has not been well controlled, negative influence may be triggered when using together with conventional medicine during chemotherapy, and high cost of therapy is another factors influencing the poor patient on accepting treatment. Due to this, non-conventional medicine should not be used to treat serious illness, and government should provide more specific measures for administration and doctors should have more communication with patients to make particularly therapeutic schedule and patients should enhance self-protection awareness in order to cannot become the victim of fraud. Only by doing so can patients could quickly recover from severe sickness and doctors would make significant progresses on skills then obtain more confidence to treating other patients, as well as make society safer and better in the future.