Medicines, traditional therapies, treatments. SJ Dodgson. MJoTA 2012. v6n1 p0325
Traditional medicines pages are being constantly updated on these pages, you can find them through the MJoTA.org search box.
On this page you can read constantly updated articles from all over about what the RSS publisher calls complementary medicine. The RSS publisher is not a US government source.
These articles are all about therapies that are considered alternative or complementary, and are called this because of a dilemma. Parts of plants, or whole plants, have long been known to cure illness.
The profession of pharmacy started because of the scientific method: the need to have the first pill identical to the millionth pill. When you are dealing with plants, a little more rain, a little less iron in the soil, a little more selenium: the millionth plant can have very different amounts of vitamins and minerals and therapeutic molecules than the first plant. And the dilemma: alternative medicine deals in plants and parts of plants and pharmacy deals in pills.
Another dilemma is that no specialized training or knowledge is needed to deal in plants. Which means that anyone ill seeking counsel of a complementary medicine practitioner can be cured spectacularly by plant therapy, or killed slowly or rapidly because that plant was poison.
Which is the point. Whether they are pills or plants, medicines are poison. They are killing bacteria, fungi, viruses or attacking molecules in our bodies that are not working properly. A little medicine can cure us; too much, and it can kill us.
Which is why the United States government takes our health so seriously that it requires complicated medicines and devices to be prescribed by health professionals licensed to practice medicine, and dispensed by a health professional licensed to practice pharmacy.
