What is the relationship between alternative medicine and overall health?

The current general consensus in the industry is that reasonable and standardized alternative therapies can supplement modern mainstream medical care and become an important part of the overall health management chain, but they can never directly replace conventional clinical treatments.

I have been working in health management for almost 6 years, and I have seen too many people who messed up the relationship between the two. I used to have a 32-year-old Internet operator who suffered from chronic shoulder and neck pain after working at a desk for a long time. She did not need surgery after an MRI. The orthopedic department prescribed anti-inflammatory analgesics and home stretching. When the pain was severe, she would still go to a rehabilitation practitioner at a regular traditional Chinese medicine hospital for moxibustion and fascial release. In more than three months, the visual pain score dropped from 7 to 2, and the previous problem of not sleeping well all night due to pain was also relieved. Do you think this part is not covered by mainstream medical care? In fact, it’s not the case. It’s just that mainstream medical treatment focuses more on “eliminating lesions”, while overall health requires full-dimensional comfort in physiology, psychology, and living conditions. Alternative therapies can just fill this gap and help people move from a “disease-free” state to a “vital” state.

Of course, there are always many voices of opposition, which is completely understandable. Last year, I met a 62-year-old aunt with type 2 diabetes. After listening to Yeluzi’s health class, she stopped taking the anti-diabetic drugs prescribed by the doctor. She went for the so-called "bioenergy physiotherapy" every day, which was said to be able to cure diabetes. Only half a month later, she went to the emergency room because of ketoacidosis. Nowadays, many clinicians are cautious about alternative therapies. The core reason is that such informal institutions always promote alternative therapies as magic medicine that can "cure all diseases", crowding out the core position of conventional treatment, and instead pushing people in the opposite direction of health, which completely violates the original intention of overall health.

Don’t think that the relationship between the two is black and white. In recent years, many pain departments, rehabilitation departments and even oncology departments in tertiary hospitals have incorporated acupuncture, mindfulness meditation, Baduanjin, which are traditionally considered alternative therapies, into standardized rehabilitation programs. For example, patients after breast surgery, after routine radiotherapy and chemotherapy, follow the medical staff to do auricular acupuncture twice a week and practice Baduanjin for 10 minutes a day, which can significantly relieve postoperative anxiety and upper limb edema, and the recovery speed is much faster than that of patients who only receive routine follow-up.

To put it bluntly, overall health is like taking care of your own small balcony vegetable garden. Mainstream medical treatments are insecticides and fungicides. If you really get bugs or get sick, you must rely on them to save yourself, otherwise the vegetables will rot in the soil.； Formal alternative therapy is more like pouring nutrient solution and building a pergola to help vegetables grow stronger and bear more fruits. If you have worms, it will definitely not work if you just water the nutrient solution. If you spray pesticides without loosening the soil and fertilizing, the vegetables will not grow well. Only by arranging their respective positions can you truly understand the "health" of the land.