alternative Methods of healing

http://www.methodsofhealing.com lol... phunny how things come up :P hahah just when i was about to close my net.. i recieved an email tellin me about alternative medicine, holististic treatments and other traditional methods of healing at http://www.methodsofhealing.com so thought before i hit bed id check it out...

it says it helps smokers to STOP SMOKING :P sounds interesting... so all of u who do mite want to check holistic treatments...

besides that it also claims Irritable Bowel Syndrome which is alos stress related... so what i figure is that this alternate medicine tretment thing helps fight stress related stuff...

okay now lets see what wikipedia has to say about it :

Alternative medicine describes practices used in place of conventional medical treatments. Complementary medicine describes practices used in conjunction and cooperation with conventional medicine, to assist the existing process. The term complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is an umbrella term for both branches. CAM includes practices that incorporate spiritual, metaphysical, or religious underpinnings; non-evidence based practices, non-European medical traditions, or newly developed approaches to healing.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine defines complementary and alternative medicine as "a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not presently considered to be part of conventional medicine". It also defines integrative medicine as "[combining] mainstream medical therapies and CAM therapies for which there is some high-quality scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness".[1] Ralph Snyderman and Andrew Weil state "integrative medicine is not synonymous with complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). It has a far larger meaning and mission in that it calls for restoration of the focus of medicine on health and healing and emphasizes the centrality of the patient-physician relationship".[2]
The list of therapies included under CAM changes gradually. If and when CAM therapies that are proven to be safe and effective become adopted into conventional health care, they gradually cease to be considered CAM, since adoption and acceptance often take time.


Holism appears in psychosomatic medicine. In the 1970s the holistic approach was considered one possible way to conceptualize psychosomatic phenomena. Instead of charting one-way causal links from psyche to soma, or vice-versa, it aimed at a systemic model, where multiple biological, psychological and social factors were seen as interlinked. Other, alternative approaches at that time were psychosomatic and somatopsychic approaches, which concentrated on causal links only from psyche to soma, or from soma to psyche, respectively. (Lipowski 1977) At present it is commonplace in psychosomatic medicine to state that psyche and soma cannot really be separated for practical or theoretical purposes. A disturbance on any level - somatic, psychic, or social - will radiate to all the other levels, too. In this sense, psychosomatic thinking is similar to the biopsychosocial model of medicine.
In alternative medicine, a holistic approach to healing recognizes that the emotional, mental, spiritual and physical elements of each person comprise a system, and attempts to treat the whole person in its context,[1] concentrating on the cause of the illness as well as symptoms. Examples of such holistic therapies include Acupuncture, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Indian Head Massage, Naturopathic medicine, Qi Gong, Reiki, and Reflexology. They usually do not originate from the western medical-scientific tradition, and lack scientific evidence to verify their claims. (http://www.methodsofhealing.com)

Holism (from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) is the idea that all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave.
The general principle of holism was concisely summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts".
Reductionism is sometimes seen as the opposite of holism. Reductionism in science says that a complex system can be explained by reduction to its fundamental parts. Essentially, chemistry is reducible to physics, biology is reducible to chemistry and physics, psychology and sociology are reducible to biology, etc. Some other proponents of reductionism, however, think that holism is the opposite only of greedy reductionism.
On the other hand, holism and reductionism can also be regarded as complementary viewpoints, in which case they both would be needed to get a proper account of a given system.