Complementary and Alternative Medicine – General Consultation (Discussion Page)
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regarding line 37 – My understanding of alternative medicine is that it is NOT scientific. So, the definition you propose does not really make sense?
The best example would be homeopathy – something with no supporting evidence and no physiologic plausibility, etc.
Alternative medicine or complementary medicine are names that denigrate it to start with. It is really functional & natural medicine we are talking about. I have studied both. The correct name for “conventional medicine” is “pharmacological medicine”. It is inferior in all cases in my experience for the treatment of chronic conditions. The pharmaceutical industry’s agenda is to make money, fair enough. What that entails is it must be a patentable drug (which means all natural substances are of no interest), & it must be a drug that does not cure the condition. Those are the two criteria of this “conventional medicine”.
Functional & natural medicine look for the underlying malfunctions in the body, & then restore them with natural treatments, i.e. reverse the conditions instead of treating the symptoms only.
There are thousands of examples. I gave my mother-in-law 1 supplement to take for her diabetes at the age of 85. Within 1 year she was off of her 2 diabetes drugs. She is now 97 & still requires no drugs for diabetes. Why? Because the root cause was addressed & she was not given a drug that only treats the symptoms.
I think that doctors should have to explain why they would consider a conventional medical treatment (i.e. drug) which dooms the patient to never resolving their health problem, instead of a functional medicine treatment which heals the condition.
We need some leadership to learn functional medicine & natural medicine, and go away from pharmaceutical drug treatments. We need to wake up & see that the drug way is not correct for chronic illnesses in almost all cases. The public is becoming more & more aware of this & wanting it. Wellness clinics are flourishing. “Conventional Medicine” does extremely well with acute conditions, but is sadly getting further & further behind due to not learning functional & natural medicine for chronic conditions.
I was glad to read this statement regarding the benefits on Functional and natural medicine.
The College risks making a serious error in policy making if they go ahead with including novel therapies implemented early by physicians quickly assessing new evidence with the naturopathic-type practice that would typically be thought of under the “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” label.
It is completely different for a physician to be trying a novel therapy that might be supported by case series but not yet a large trial when they feel that a specific patient might benefit from it and engage in an appropriate discussion with informed consent versus someone using some type of “natural” or homeopathic remedy. These should not be covered under the same policy.
Are the writers of this policy conflating off-label use of a medicine with homeopathy, naturopathy, etc.? I always understood conventional medicine to be whatever there was reasonable evidence for and whatever was the best practice.
This is a very important document.
All medical practice needs to be science based. All physicians need to be held the the same standard, whatever label they apply to themselves. The only standard that can be used to judge appropriate care is science. If you throw out science, you cannot regulate, because outside of a system of objectivity, any decision can be justified. There will be pressure to change this document, as many practitioners make a lot of money pushing unscientific practices on vulnerable patients. Please to not bow to that pressure. Medicine needs a scientific basis first and foremost if our patients are to trust us.
No one understands what magnetism is. Scientists in western medicine say it has no effect on the body. The measurement of a magnetic field is measured in Teslas. Nikola Tesla – the greatest scientist of all time invented magnetic field therapy and is used extensively in the former Soviet Union countries – and not as a complimentary medicine. In Canada – it’s considered complimentary medicine.
The Ontario College is the college of Physicians and Surgeons.It is not the college of Medicine.Furthermore the Ontario College are not experts in the integrative field of medicine and should play no part in complaints that are outside their scope of expertise.It has been the position of the Ontario college to ban all integrative medicine and in this they are prejudiced and basically support the multi national drug companies in all instances.They should have no part to play in judging integrative practices as they are patently prejudiced and lack the expertise.