Arad, Israel

As we are getting closer to the 21st century, the medical world seems to be divided more and more between conventional medicine and alternative medicine.

There seems to be a flight forward in the type of medicine we have become used to call conventional or scientific; technological advances are made on a daily basis in diagnostic tools up to the point that today, with MRI, you look at the inside of a patient in a tri-dimensional way, look at all his organs and see the anatomical problems; lab tests became so sophisticated as to allow to measure the concentration of separate intracellular enzymes; almost anything can be measured almost anywhere. Does that bring us closer to health? Scientific knowledge is important, even essential, but where is the practical application in our daily dealing with patients? Aren't we running too fast towards artificial and technological solutions while forgetting to look around and behind us for cheaper and safer solutions that have been there for a long time?

Let us take an example: in the treatment of diabetes, Acarbose has arrived. It inhibits resorption of sugar through the small intestine; great ! it can also, as a side effect cause chemical hepatitis, flatulence and diarrhea; oops ! it is expensive, and is indicated only for diabetes control: then you have guar gum, a very old natural herbal product which is cheap, which can, if not used properly, cause bloating but is otherwise safe, which decreases absorption of sugar, and cholesterol, and fats therefore treating at the same time hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia. Guess which one is mostly used in conventional medicine?

The antibiotics controversy is even worse but here popular wisdom seems to come back in force and many patients treat themselves with garlic, onion syrup, echinacea and propolis, in an attempt to escape the overkill of medical treatment.

Phytotherapy has come a long way from a traditional means of treatment to a scientific way of therapeutics. Luckily, the scientific analysis of herbal medicine has been done by investigating the popular claims first, then trying to understand the biochemical mechanism. Most of those claims have been confirmed and moreover, it has been proven that extracting the " active ingredient" does not give the same result as the use of the whole plant, which of course was known for a long time.

Homeopathy is now 200 years old, and despite all its detractors, has proven itself as a superior form of treatment that can cure the patient and not only give him a respite of his symptoms. The use of modern mathematical and physical concepts like the mathematics of chaos, allows us to understand how it works ( if you understand the math....), but the daily clinical proof is compelling, that is if you are willing to look. I recently had a discussion with a recently graduated MD; I grabbed a book containing the basic explanation about homeopathy and wanted to hand it over to him: he literally took two steps backwards as if I was giving him some poisonous substance to handle; eerie.....

What place must those "alternative" medicines take in our practice? My gut answer will of course be: the first one! in well trained hands, those are the safest you can dream of and their purpose is not only to remove the actual problem but to go deep into the disease and eradicate the cause, which often remains totally unknown to us. Slapping a steroid ointment on a weeping eczema stops it within a few days, but it keeps coming back; finding the right homeopathic treatment while alleviating the problem wth herbs is more complicated but in the end the disease does not recur and the patient in general feels better and is better. Education towards this goal is essential as a deep understanding is absolutely necessary to have long lasting results; there are no shortcuts as some patients and physicians want to believe, asking "what do you give for....": this is a mechanistical thinking used all the time in conventional medicine where once you have finished your studies, things start to look like cooking recipes: take a patient with hypertension, add a diuretic and an ACE inhibitor, wait a few days and voila, you have a cure.....Despite the microscopic dissection of the physiopathology of hypertension and a real deep and amazing understanding of almost all the mechanisms involved, we still do not cure hypertension, we compensate it and prevent its lethal consequences. This does not mean it is not a huge progress and accomplishment, but our patient is dependent on his pills for a life time

The proper practce of Homeopathy and Phytotherapy depends also on a sound knowledge of conventional medicine, at least in its diagnostic aspects. The most famous homeopaths, Hahnemann, Kent and Sankaran said it, less famous ones have repeated it and daily practice shows us this is a real necessity. Some people object that as we do not look at the patient the same way and we do not threat them the same way, we have no use for a conventional diagnosis: go tell that to the patient who was successfully treated for hematuria until he ended up with a incurable bladder cancer.