Mainstream & Alternative (Medicine)

Throughout my years, both professionally and personally, I’ve gathered a sense of the differences between what we’d call “mainstream” or Western Medicine, and “alternative” or holistic medicine.

This is not to argue the benefits or liabilities of either, because that is for you to judge.  Medical choices are kind of like religion: it’s something we develop over years of belief, programming and life-lessons; and we have to come to those realizations on our own.  It’s personal.

So, everything I’ll say, is just OPINION ONLY.  And my opinion, to be exact.  It’s what I’ve accrued over half a century of graduating from the school of Parental Misguidance and learning invaluable lessons in the School of Hard Knocks.

The Signs of Spring

Western Medicine is good at certain things. They’ve developed technology, diagnostics and pharmaceuticals that can treat a wide variety of conditions and respond with life-saving agility and speed for emergencies, traumas, infections and pharmaceutical mediation.

What they’re not good at is seeing deeper into the root causes of human suffering and/or putting together the disease picture as the sum of the whole person, rather than isolating symptoms.  For this reason, they often fail at what I would call “complex chronic diseases”, and at best, resort to symptom management at this point.

Alternative Medicine can be a bit  of a quagmire to wade through.  Let’s say, if your logical “left-brain” leads you to your Doctor’s office, then your creative / intuitive “right-brain” leads you to your holistic healer. Your relationship with your doctor, and with Western Medicine in general, may be one that your parents or school or peer pressure enabled and sustained for you, whereas facing your personal demons, entering the black night of the soul, or having life-changing spiritual awakenings might have led to to Holistic Medicine.  Or: none of the above.  Maybe one day, you just tried a chiropractor, and he fixed your back pain.  As simple as that.

Whatever the case is, health management is truly a spectrum of resources and realities, and it’s hinged on the openness, the awareness, and the inner wisdom of the recipient. Nothing right or wrong about where you fall on the spectrum.  Life is for learning – and if you’re open to it, you’ll keep learning about you and about health until the day you kick the bucket.

More later.  Much more. Much later.