In the health industry there are many types of  therapies and many more therapists who practise them, choosing what is right for you may not always be immediately obvious. Unfortunately it is not hard to find health practitioners with a strong bias towards their own profession and a low opinion of other types of therapy which can add further difficulty in deciding what is right for you.

Within any health profession some practitioners are better than others and even the best have bad days so it is not atall helpful to place all of your faith in one thing and be dismissive of all others. This most often applies (in my experience) to the way practitioners of Alternative Medicine and practitioners of Western Medicine can be a little wary of one another at times, it does not and should not be that way because they tend to be good at different things.

Many years ago I read an article in a Sunday newspaper magazine that was written by a  general practioner who practiced both Western and Alternate medicine in his clinic. He stated that broadly speaking acute and life threatening medical problems such as infectious disease, cancer and heart disease were best treated with Western Medicine but he often felt that the more chronic health problems that were not necessarily life threatening were often treated better with Alternate Medicine. Lower back pain for instance will usually not have a potentially fatal cause but it can mess with your life style enormously, many osteopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists and massage therapists have many  grateful patients who have found these therapies to be a very reliable remedy for their aching backs.

There are plenty of times when Alternate and Western therapies can be successfully utilized together such as when a cancer patient may benefit from acupuncture for the nauseating side effects of chemotherapy or when nutritional advice from a naturopath may help a patient recover from surgery faster.

There are some things that do need to be taken into account when you elect to use a multi-disciplinary approach to your health, for instance just because a medicine is “natural” does not mean that it cannot have a dangerous cross reaction with a synthetic pharmaceutical medication. Taking herbal anti-inflammatories may be too much if taken in conjunction with NSAIDs from your doctor, a chat with a pharmacist should steer you in the right direction about this.

If you feel happy and satisfied with your practitioner there may be no need to look any further, but there will be times when you may need to use something different, your physio-therapist who might normally take good care of your back pain may need some help in the form of chiropractic to get your back to where you need it to be.

Many practitioners of Alternate Medicine are good at healthy life-style and dietary advice but might not know who to refer you onto if you need specialist treatment but your GP probably will know.

Western Medicine can save your life, Alternate Medicine will help make it worth living.