The Evolution of Alternative Medicine

Back in the 1990s, the word "alternative" was a synonym for hip and forward-thinking. There was alternative music and alternative energy; there were even high-profile alternative presidential candidates like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader. That was the decade when doctors started to realize just how many Americans were using alternative medicine, starting with a 1993 paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine . The paper reported that one in three Americans were using some kind of "unconventional therapy." Only 28 percent of them were telling their primary-care doctors about it. I was in high school at the time, and I knew about alternative medicine from my father, a family physician. He'd learned Transcendental Meditation back in medical school, and when I was a child, he began studying Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India. He never stopped practicing conventional medicine, but he added new things. At home, if I had a persistent sinus infection, he'd put me on antibiotics. But if I had a low-level cold, he'd advise me to drink ginger tea, inhale eucalyptus steam, and eat turmeric with honey. And the school I attended started and ended each day with a group meditation. Enough Americans had similar… Read full this story

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