Viscious Cycle of Healthcare Mentality

Allopathic medicine or allopathy is a health care system in which medical doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other healthcare professionals are licensed to practice and treat symptoms of ailments and diseases. Treatment protocols generally address the symptoms of particular issues, often regardless of the root cause of the condition. For example, treating chronic headaches with pharmaceuticals, rather than a change in lifestyle factors such as stress or poor diet. Obesity might be treated with Lap-band gastric surgery to restrict the size of the stomach rather than the individual adjusting their diet.

Allopathic medicine came to dominate health care over the span of the nineteenth century. This new scientific path to health was attributed to the increase of university medical training to guarantee practitioners were experts in the science of medicine. Consequently, the laboratory became the desired venue for medical research.

Doctors and medical professionals saw their social status increase as they established their own associations to set rules and standards regarding who they felt could or should not be allowed to practice health care methods. As the American Medical Association (AMA) formed in 1847, it gained its influence in society, as healers of various medical models, such as osteopaths, chiropractors, herbalists and midwives were discredited as not being “based on science”. The first chiropractic organization was the American Chiropractic Association (ACA), and was founded in 1905.

The American Medical Association is an extremely powerful organization with its political influences as well as vast financial resources. The association and many of its members previously (and maybe currently) did not want to give away patients to other methods that the public sees as more effective, cheaper, less invasive and sometimes easier to obtain. For example, up until 1976, the AMA labeled chiropractic as unethical and unscientific and conspired to destroy chiropractic medicine. A lawsuit in this year revealed that the AMA’s intent was to decrease competition for financial reasons rather than to protect the public from unethical practitioners.¹

During the proceedings it was shown that the AMA attempted to:

Undermine Chiropractic schools
Undercut insurance programs for Chiropractic patients
Conceal evidence of the effectiveness of Chiropractic care
Subvert government inquires into the effectiveness of Chiropractic
Promote other activities that would control the monopoly that the AMA had on health care²

To have CAM practitioners and their methods become more integrated within the US healthcare system, things need to change with how the AMA recognizes these other healthcare systems.

Allopathic medicine is the most common healthcare model in the United States. Other names for allopathic medicine are:

Western medicine
biomedicine
mainstream medicine
conventional medicine
orthodox medicine

Typical treatments consist of:

medications
surgery
radiation
chemotherapy
other therapies and procedures

Other approaches to health care are sometimes called complementary alternative medicine (CAM), integrative medicine or alternate medicine. Western and alternative approaches often disregard any integration with one another. However, some more open-minded practitioners of Western allopathic medicine are beginning to integrate alternative and complementary methods along with their treatment protocols. These include:

homeopathy
naturopathy
chiropractic care
Chinese medicine
ayurveda

Many people have grown weary of the amount of time, money and effort they spend at their allopathic doctors with little or no improvement of their chronic or occasional conditions. However, the US system of biomedicine does seem quite miraculous when it comes to treating trauma such as re-attaching a severed limb, re-setting of broken bones, reconstructive surgery, diagnostics and other immediate types of injuries. However, chronic issues like lower back pain and sciatica, allergies and headaches being treated entirely with pharmaceuticals have lost some recent market share to CAM options such as exercise, herbs and lifestyle changes.