5000 Year-Old Medical Discovery Unearthed!

August 30, 2009 Filed Under: Herbal Therapy, Natural medicine

When you’re sick, normally you go to the doctor, the doctor will naturally depending on your illness, prescribe medicine of one sort or another. You buy the medicine, you take it and hopefully you get better quickly. This is how the health profession works – a cycle of diagnosis and prescription.

If on the other hand, someone was to recommend herbs instead of medicine, you’d probably declare that person – a quack. But nowadays, studies are being conducted to see if there is any merit to what’s commonly known as – natural medicine.

Natural medicine is the use of natural methods, herbal medicines, and traditional practices to heal ailments. Every culture has a form of natural medicine. In ancient cultures, village medicine men served as the doctors of the community, passing on medical knowledge to the apprentices that followed them.

Many categories of the healing methods fall under natural medicine. Among these are traditional medicine, complementary medicine, and alternative medicine. Usually, natural medicine refers to medical practices that were in place before modern medicine arrived. This includes herbal medicine, or phytotherapy, which is prevalent in Chinese, Indian and Greek medicine.

Upon the advent of modern medicine, many professionals discarded the use of herbs in favour of man-made medicine. The fact that these treatments are based on the healing properties of some herbs was just about forgotten. For example, opium, digitalis, quinine, and aspirin all have their roots in traditional medicine.

Although natural medicine can be considered a lost art it doesn’t mean that it has lost effectiveness over time. In some cases, natural therapy has proven to be better than modern medicine. This has led some doctors to seriously consider and study in depth the possible uses of natural medicine.

At this point it’s important to stress that not all the natural remedies are legitimate, so only using those remedies which have been thoroughly studied and are relatively risk free is recommended.

For instance – natural medicine. There are many well documented and studied herbal remedies available. However, only those that deal with minor ailments such as coughs, colds, fever, skin rashes or similar are likely to be recommended by health professionals. These remedies are sometimes superior to synthetic medicine. This is because herbal medicines are less likely to cause negative side effects.

Currently there are numerous organizations that study the effects of natural medicine – among which is herbal medicine. Some governments and health agencies openly advocate the use of natural methods since they are inexpensive and relatively risk-free.

As their studies are compiled, more herbs and treatments are added to the list of accepted medicines. However, many herbs and treatments have been proven to be bogus medicine. This represents a challenge for both the user and the agencies because they have to ascertain that the treatments they either use, recommend or advocate are legitimate.

There exist today many alternative medical treatments that fall under natural medicine. However, not all of them have been proven to be effective such as homeopathy, aromatherapy, acupuncture, and other alternative medical treatments. It’s worth consulting the experts as to the legitimacy of these treatments.

Natural medicine should also be thought of as an accompanying or supplement medicine. Right now, the current collective medical trend suggests that natural medicine be used only to supplement accepted modern medical practices.

The practice of modern medicine revolves around diagnosing an illness and prescribing treatments for such. Natural medicine is helpful because it suggests that treatment be not necessarily given only when sick. Natural medicine strives to make each patient practice good health habits. These habits include good diet, healthy living, regular exercise and natural treatments.

It’s the same line of thought that leads our parents to tell us to eat our vegetables. A healthy lifestyle will do no harm to our well-being – on the contrary. And this is the foundation of natural medicine – be it massage, herbal medicine, aromatherapy or similar.

Science in its quest for excellence, is studying the knowledge of past wisdom. This, surprisingly, leads us back to the abundance of remedies nature offers. The possibilities of finding remedies to everyday illnesses in natural medicine are encouraging. So staying tuned to studying these remedies is worthwhile until we can verify 100% that these therapies are truly helpful to our health and our society.