See the original post: Eye Exercises for Eyestrain

The second is physics therapy. This therapy is used for the body so it can be relax because if our body relaxes, it will help us to cure our sick. In this therapy there are three kind of therapy that usually used; they are aroma therapy, hydro therapy, and osteotherapy. Aroma therapy is used to relaxation for our body. Hydro therapy is the therapy using water as the media. Osteotherapy is the therapy for our bones to prevent people suffering osteoporosis. Osteotherapy has the same function as chiropractic therapy. Chiropractic therapy is also to repair the bones arrangement. The last therapy is energy therapy. Energy therapy is a kind of therapy that uses the energy of ours. The function of this therapy is for balancing the body and mind. Energy therapy we can get the positive energy. There are two kinds of energy therapy, meditation and yoga.

In Indonesia is also known reflection. Reflection is a kind of therapy that given with a tool. There are many kind of therapy of the reflection. There are acupuncture, acupressure, reflexology, and massage. Reflection is the kind of therapy that given to our body directly. @alternativemedicine

Additional tax money has been spent to recruit and train young doctors to do research in this field, launching some into careers as alternative medicine providers.

Doctors need to know about popular remedies so they can discuss them nonjudgmentally and give competent advice, the government says, and many universities and medical groups agree.

“Patients are using these things” whether doctors think they should or should not, and safety is a big concern, said Dr. Victor Sierpina, an acupuncturist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who heads a group of academics who favor such training.

Harry Potter medicine
But to critics, it’s like teaching Harry Potter medicine. Students are being asked to close their eyes to science principles that guide the rest of their training in order to keep an open mind about pseudoscience, they say.

“I’m concerned about the teaching of illogical thinking to medical students” and lending credence to biologically implausible theories like distance healing and energy fields, said Dr. Stephen Barrett, a retired physician who runs Quackwatch, a Web site on medical scams.

Teaching about alternative medicine implies acceptance of it and “potentially creates more gullibility and less critical, objective thinking,” said Dr. Wallace Sampson, editor of the journal Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. “This will be felt in many indirect ways,” he said, including judgment errors, misguiding people with severe diseases, and lax standards and laws.

The real issue is not whether alternative medicine should be taught, but how, said Dr. Joseph Jacobs, former head of the federal Office of Alternative Medicine.

“The parallel here is creationism versus science,” Jacobs said. “If the topic is taught objectively, to help students communicate with patients, it’s a good idea. If it’s being taught as part of an advocacy, for acceptance among physicians, I think that’s a little bit bogus.”

Sometimes the line is blurry.

Some schools have close ties to alternative medicine providers or advocates who shape information on the schools’ Web sites or classes for students and the public. Two examples:

* The University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine has medical residency programs in hospitals around the country, partly sponsored by well-known advocate Dr. Andrew Weil, the center’s founder. A private group that promotes such care, the Bravewell Collaborative, gives scholarships for dozens of the Arizona school’s students to get hands-on training in integrative care clinics.
* The University of Minnesota offers medical students an elective course in alternative healing methods at a Hawaiian medical center founded by a philanthropist-advocate of such care, although students pay their own transportation and living expenses. In interviews with an Associated Press writer in 2007, several students raved about things they had tried firsthand, and said they returned more willing to recommend acupuncture, meditation, yoga, herbal remedies and other nontraditional care.

“Consumers are demanding it” and more research is needed to see what works, said Mary Jo Kreitzer, who directs the Minnesota school’s alternative medicine curriculum. “Ultimately we need to align policy” so that insurers pay for these therapies, she said. “You could say that in that respect, we are advocates.”

The field got a boost 10 years ago, with creation of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It made merging alternative and mainstream medicine “a central and overarching goal” and gave $22.5 million to 12 medical schools, two nursing schools and the American Medical Student Association to develop curriculum plans.

Kreitzer’s and Sierpina’s universities got grants, and both are active in the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine — 42 centers involved in researching or advocating for complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM.

However, a review of some of those teaching plans by Drs. Donald Marcus and Laurence McCullough of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston concludes that they are “strongly biased in favor of CAM,” cite poor-quality research, and were not updated after better studies revealed a therapy did not work. The review is in the September issue of the journal Academic Medicine.

The section on herbals in the Medical Student Association’s plan was written by the head of the American Botanical Council, an industry-supported research and education group, the article says.

Sierpina, the head of the medical school consortium, said the purpose of these lesson plans is not propaganda.

“We are not trying to make students CAM practitioners,” but to train them to be “sensitive to where people come from, their folk medicine, their home remedies,” he said.

Just as there are true believers who ignore evidence that something doesn’t work, there are true doubters who are guilty of “arrogant thinking that we’ve got it all figured out,” Sierpina said.

Dr. Mehmet Oz agreed. The Columbia University heart surgeon and frequent Oprah Winfrey guest, now with his own TV show, has long shown an open mind toward complementary and alternative medicine.

“Medicine is very provincial. We grow up thinking the way others have taught us to think. We are naturally biased. It is imperative that we look at what alternative cultures offer us, that we at least are fair in our skepticism of their impact.” Otherwise, “we run a risk of locking out newcomers” with fresh ideas, he said.

That would be people like Jimmy Wu, a newly graduated doctor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Raised in a family originally from Taiwan, Wu said traditional healing practices are “very much ingrained” in how he thinks about sickness and health.

“It’s just a very different way of observing” a patient to decide on treatments, rather than relying so heavily on lab tests and other traditional medical tools, he said.

The Madison medical school offered an optional course in alternative medicine. Seeking more than that, Wu spent a summer in Beijing with a university faculty member observing traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture, and hopes to include these in a family medicine practice someday. With so many people using alternative care, “it is important that it be treated more than just an afterthought” by medical schools, Wu said.

Officials at several top schools say they teach respect for patient choices, but do not teach unproven remedies or theories.

“All medical treatments ought to be held to the same standard,” whether a prescription drug, an herbal pill or a mode of care, said Dr. Philip Gruppuso, Brown University’s associate dean for medical education.

For example, acupuncture comes up in several places in the curriculum where there is evidence that it may help certain types of pain. However, students are not taught about body meridiens that allegedly channel energy, which acupuncturists claim to affect. Whether a school is promoting magical thinking about a therapy depends “more on how it’s taught than what’s taught,” Gruppuso said.

When it comes to easing chronic low back pain in minority populations, yoga may make for a sound alternative to standard treatment. That’s the key finding from a recent study of 30 back-pain-plagued adults, all of whom were recruited from community health centers that serve racially diverse, low-income neighborhoods. Use of yoga and other complementary therapies for low back pain is fairly uncommon among minorities and low-income individuals, possibly due to lack of access to such treatments, according to the study’s authors.

For 12 weeks, participants either took part in weekly, 75-minute yoga classes (focusing on meditation and breathing in addition to yoga poses) or received standard treatment for their back pain. Members of the yoga group were also given yoga CDs, mats, and props in order to keep up a daily yoga practice at home.

By the study’s end, pain had decreased by one-third among those practicing yoga (compared to just 5 percent in the participants receiving standard care). What’s more, pain medication use in the yoga group dropped by 80 percent, but remained the same among the other study members.

Yoga Banishes Back Pain originally appeared on About.com Alternative Medicine on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 06:00:18.

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