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.
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