CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE

The conventional, mainstream Western approach to health care, based on treating symptoms and isolating a specific disorder rather that treating the whole person is the one we are all familiar with in the United States.

It is often referred to as Western, conventional or allopathic medicine. Allopathic medicine and allopathy are terms coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy.

Allopathic medicine employs a method of treating disease with remedies that produce effects different from those caused by the disease itself. This term generally refers to the conventional western medical model, which relies heavily on the use of pharmaceuticals.

Allopathy or western medicine is a medical approach which seeks to cure by producing a condition in the body different than, or opposite to, the condition that exists within the diseased state.

However, many aspects of traditional medicine systems such as Traditional Chinese Medicine are also considered allopathic in that their treatments oppose the patient's symptoms. Allopathy as used in the United States generally refers to medical practitioners with the Doctor of Medicine degree.

With the term allopathy (meaning "other than the disease"), Hahnemann intended to point out how physicians with conventional training employed therapeutic approaches that, in his view, merely treated symptoms and failed to address the disharmony produced by the underlying disease. Homeopathic doctors saw such symptomatic treatments as "opposites treating opposites" and believed these conventional methods were harmful to patients.

We practice Functional Medicine and combine Allopathic and Traditional Chinese Medicine. We only use pharmaceuticals when absolutly necessary or to improve the function of the body. For most the combining of the best of different modalities provides the best outcome.