Nowadays traditional medicine, which treats illnesses by dosing drugs and medicines according to the
pathologies of the patient, has come a long way and is every day more efficient, but it’s not the only option.
Many alternative therapies are being scientifically studied, and have proven themselves to be a fair, natural
substitute to classical medicine.
First of all, traditional medicine is advancing in an astonishing way, new cures for terrible diseases are being
discovered everyday by medical experts. Doctors are nowadays able to perform surgery robotically, to
reproduce our DNA and to create new drugs, there are so many specializations and fields of study and
working that is highly unlikely to suffer from an unknown disease. Furthermore, it’s important not to forget
that many of the illnesses we treat ‘superficially’ today or have been completely deleted thanks to ordinary
treatments, used to kill thousands of people in the past.
Anyway, it happens sometimes that doctors simply do not manage to get rid of an illness, and that’s one of
the cases in which a patient may get willing to try new forms of medicine as an alternative. These
‘alternative therapies’, such as acupuncture, herbal treatments, chiropractic, have been used for centuries
since the beginning of civilization, but have been set aside after the development of modern medicine. One
of their benefit, for instance, is that they’re completely natural and delete those annoying side effects that can
occur when taking a medicine. As a consequence, a patient who have limited access to a certain kind of
drugs because of its side effects, could be advantage by trying a different form of treatment. On the other
side, not every alternative therapy has been scientifically proven to be effective yet, and if something is
‘natural’ it does not mean it is necessarily ‘safe’. A solution could be to use them as complementary therapies
together with the traditional cures, in order to obtain the best results.
To sum up, alternative therapies are nowadays a concrete option and an opportunity for medicine, but in my
opinion it’s important to be aware of the benefits and risks before choosing one path instead of the other.