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.

It is hard to know sometimes what therapy to choose or who to see or to get referred to, the opinion of someone whose judgement you trust is not always there when you need it. Whether you are looking for a GP, a massage therapist, a dentist or a chiropractor it is important to find someone who you are comfortable with, treats you professionally and helps you fix whatever it is that brought you to them.

Asking the right questions helps and the answers you are given should be convincing and understandable, it is neither good to feel patronised by a childish explanation nor made feel stupid or confused by having jargon thrown at you. This goes for advice too, usually there are things that people can do to help themselves during the course of treatment and things that they should avoid doing. If you are given information to read about your health condition it is a good idea to read it, this includes the product information slips in medication packaging.

You may want to use more than one therapy to improve your health, some therapies work well together, osteopathy and massage when used strategically together can produce very satisfying results. On the other hand pharmaceutical medication may not mix atall well with herbal medicine, even though one is synthetic and the other natural they still may produce an adverse reaction if ingested together. Taking a high dose of pharmaceutical blood thinners for example might be too much if you are taking herbal blood thinners at the same time, your pharmacist should be able to advise you particularly if his chemist sells herbal medicine as many do now.

When you get advice about how long your health concern may take to get remedied you cannot expect optimum results if you don’t follow the course of treatment, long term problems usually need more time to fix than acute conditions. This goes just as much for getting the necessary number of massages as it does for finishing a course of antibiotics even though you think you are “good enough” now.

A good practitioner recognises their limitations and will refer you onto a different therapist sometimes to get further improvement, a chiropractor for instance who is treating your lower back pain might want you to see a naturopath or nutritionist to help you reduce your bodyweight because it may be a big part of the problem, remain open about trying new things.

“Alternate” medicine does not need to be at odds with “Mainstream” medicine, they  tend to be good at different things. You might get neck pain that really nags away at you, the x-rays show it is not bad enough for surgery,  anti inflammatories may not help you either so getting some alternate medicine may be what you need. If you break your leg, get cancer, have a heart attack, feel suicidal or get hepatitis a medical practitioner is the person you want to see.

We still have a long way to go but gradually different health practitioners are learning and respecting more of  what each other does.