by Alice Poirier

Created on: October 23, 2008

Natural cures are like any other cure, pill, potion, treatment or remedy. Some things work for some people and others do not. With traditional western medicine as well as with natural cures, they often work better because of what we call in medicine "the placebo effect" . An example of a placebo is giving a patient a sugar pill but telling them it is for pain and the patient feels better and has less pain after taking the "fake" pill because he believed it was the real thing. The point of this is if you really believe that something is going to help you then it probably will whether it is a natural cure or a traditional one. Most people who condone natural cures are from a slightly older generation where you saw a Doctor and he had a pill or surgical remedy that might help and that was all. Now in most medical schools in the US students are taught about the traditional treatments as well as other so called" natural" treatments if for no other reason then they need to know what else their patients may try if the traditional treatments are not working or as some may do, making the patient sicker instead of better. Many clinicians now are willing to let their patients try other natural cures even if they do not necessarily believe it will help. Again it's like the placebo effect, if they think something may help, then letting them try keeps them going and fighting, versus a a patient who is down and feeling defeated by their illness and the failure of traditional medicine to make them better. The best of both worlds is when a person can benefit from our traditional western medicine as well as some natural treatments . The theme in the new large cancer treatment centers in our country is to treat the whole person, from head to toe ( no matter where the cancer is) and to use all modalities possible to do that. They will use all kinds of traditional and natural cures and treatments to help the patient . Their focus is not strictly on the area that has cancer but they treat the entire person. They treat the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional aspects of a person in a totally holistic way.

Information about natural cures is readily available in this country. You can find tons of info on the net, and libraries and book stores are full of books about natural cures like herbal medicines, acupuncture, hypnotherapy, reikki, vibrational medicine, massage therapy, foot detox, as well as many many others. And some informtion is available from many health care clinicians.

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