Modern Medicine and Traditional Medicine

ALADIN
61112023

UNIVERSITY OF BATAM
FACULTY OF MEDICINE
2015

I. Background
Prescription medicines and advances in medical treatment have
helped people avoid disability and death caused by disease, lowered
overall treatment costs, and has lowered death rates for heart disease,
stroke, cancer, and other deadly diseases for several decades. Since
1970, the death rate from heart disease has dropped nearly 60% and
deaths from stroke are down 70%. The death rate from cancer has
dropped 16% since 1990 and the death rate from HIV/AIDS has
dropped more than 75% from its highest point in 1995. In addition,
the average life span of Americans increased from 69.7 years in 1960
to approximately 80 years in 2007.
In the last decade there has been a rapidly growing use of herbal
medicines. This phenomenon which captured the attention of many
scientists led them to play a role in this research. Modern
pharmacology is for the most part directly derived from plants, but it
is also well known that the use of active principles (drugs) contained
in them has been considered an important progress in the care of
diseases. However, a growing group of pharmacologists today, after an
initial phase of pertinent criticisms of some aspects of herbal medicine
still extremely based on experience, recognize the possibility of
analyzing the scientific basis of biological effects produced by
medicinal products composed essentially of vegetable extracts.
Furthermore, efficacy and safety of products based on
medicinal plants represent a natural object of interest for the
pharmacologist. The evaluation of clinical efficacy and safety of
herbal medicines with the goal to know if they are efficient to treat
diseases and if their use is free of damage to the health of consumers
is surely the most important aspect either for medical community or
public opinion

II. Discussion
About 40 percent of Americans have tried some form of
alternative medicine at some point, and some $35 billion a year is
spent on it. A certain amount of abuse seems like a given.
Nonetheless, says Salzberg, the bottom line is that studies clearly
show alternative medicine simply does not work. And at first glance,
that contention seems nearly incontrovertible.
The scientific literature is replete with careful studies that show,
again and again, that virtually all of the core treatments plied by
alternative practitioners, including homeopathy, acupuncture,
chiropractic, and others, help patients no more than do sham
treatments designed to fool patients into thinking theyre getting the
treatment when theyre really not.
In contrast to alternative medicine, modern medicine was
formed around successes in fighting infectious disease, says
Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San
Francisco and a Nobel laureate. Infectious agents were the big
sources of disease and mortality, up until the last century. We could
find out what the agent was in a sick patient and attack the agent
medically.
The medical infrastructure we have today was designed with
infectious agents in mind. Physician training and practices, hospitals,
the pharmaceutical industry, and health insurance all were built around
the model of running tests on sick patients to determine which drug or
surgical procedure would best deal with some discrete offending
agent. The system works very well for that original purpose, against
even the most challenging of these agentsas the taming of the AIDS
virus attests.
Yet, medicines triumph over infectious disease brought to the
fore the so-called chronic, complex diseasesheart disease, cancer,

diabetes, Alzheimers, and other illnesses without a clear causal agent.

Now that we live longer, these typically late-developing diseases have
become by far our biggest killers. Heart disease, prostate cancer,
breast cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases now
account for three-quarters of our health-care spending. We face an
entirely different set of big medical challenges today, says
Blackburn. But we havent rethought the way we fight illness. That
is, the medical establishment still waits for us to develop some sign of
one of these illnesses, then seeks to treat us with drugs and surgery.
Instead, the author asserts that the drugs created to treat these chronic
diseases have been largely inadequate or worse, pointing to examples
such as Avastin and Avandia. As a result, the author tries to draw the
connection between a few shortcomings to the fact that America
spends vastly more on health as a percentage of gross domestic
product than every other country40 percent more than France, the
fourth-biggest payer. But what the author fails to realize is that of the
percentage we are spending on health care, only 10% or 10 cents out
of every dollar is coming from prescription drugs or treatments.
Nevertheless, the author asserts that what is needed is a system
that focuses on lowering the risk that these diseases will take hold in
the first place. We need to prevent and slow the onset of these
diseases, according to Blackburn. For those proponents of
alternative medicine, they espouse getting doctors to speak to patients
about healthy diets, encouragement of more exercise, and measures to
reduce stress.
The author goes on to cite evidence that lifestyle and attitude
changes have enormous impact on health is now overwhelming. For
example, the article points out Dean Ornish, a physician-researcher at
the University of California at San Francisco and the founder of the
independent Preventive Medicine Research Institute, who has been
showing in studies for more than three decades that diet, exercise, and

stress reduction can do a better job of preventing, slowing, and even

reversing heart disease than most drugs and surgical procedures.
To get patients to follow this alternative regiment, physicians
have to give patients more attention, meaning longer, more frequent
visits that focus on what is going on in a patients lives; more effort
spent easing anxieties, instilling healthy attitudes, and getting patients
to take responsibility for their well-being; and concerted attempts to
provide hope. In other words, conveying to patients that a physicians
commitment to caring for them will endure over time, and to imbue
patients with trust, hope, and a sense of being known. Of course,
given the current status of payments, reimbursement, and other
medical practice issues, it is difficult for doctors to have visits with
patients lasting more than 20 minutes. Moreover, studies show that
visits average about 20 minutes, that doctors change the subject back
to technical talk when patients mention their emotions, that they
interrupt patients initial statements after 23 seconds on average, that
they spend a single minute providing information, and that they bring
up weight issues with fewer than half their overweight patients.

III. Conclucion
There is no question that physicians who spend more time with
patients and listen more carefully will see benefits. Novella agreed
that a caring, bonding practitioner is more likely to get patients to
adopt healthier lifestyles, and that these changes lead to better health.
And he agrees that many patients do feel better when practitioners
actively try to help them deal with vague, hard-to-diagnose complaints
such as pain and fatigue, instead of telling them that theres no
diagnosis or effective treatment.
But these aspects of a better patient-practitioner relationship
should not be uniquely associated with alternative medicine, and such
principles should not attempt to discredit the breakthroughs and
innovations from the drug and device industry. Instead, we should
look to our doctors to be the nurturing caregivers who take the time to
listen to us, bond with us, and guide us toward healthier lifestyles and
lower levels of stress.
Ultimately, if it were not for the declines in death rates from
heart disease and stroke, created by the drug device industry, we
would lose 1 million more Americans every year. Just ask yourself,
what are the chances that you or someone you loved would be in that
1 million, this year or the next.

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