Alternative Therapies

Alternative Therapies

Integrative Healing

Integrative healing describes a set of therapies that promote the wellness of the whole being rather than the individual’s physiological state. This healing approach promotes self-discovery and enhanced emotional intelligence. The focus on the being eliminates barriers that block the individual from connecting with the inner self, discovering the inner resources and attaining harmony and balance among the physical, psycho-spiritual and emotional aspects of life.

Alternative Therapies Concepts

Alternative therapies constitute all the healthcare systems, practices and products that fall outside the boundaries of conventional medicine. Creating the unity of the mind, body and spirit is a crucial goal in alternative therapies. This unity is attained through mind-body practices, manipulative body-based practices and the manipulation of energy fields. The mind-body practices include meditation, hypnosis, prayer and expressive therapies. On the other hand, the manipulative body-based practices include massage, chiropractic and osteopathic manipulation (Townsend & Morgan, 2017). While some alternative therapies are difficult to perform and require many years of training and practice, others are simple do-it-yourself procedures.

EBP and CAM

The application of EBP is a crucial consideration in the selection of the appropriate CAM. It is important that CAM providers shift from the care approaches grounded on traditions and intuition to interventions guided by accurate and current evidence (Leach, 2010). The best patient outcomes in CAM and conventional medicine depend on the objective evaluation of the patient’s health needs and the use of data-driven tools to develop, implement and evaluate the interventions. One of the key factors the limit CAM is the low levels of evidence. However, the history of consistently effective CAM interventions such as yoga and acupuncture demonstrates that CAM has elements of EBP, which can be enhanced to guide the evaluation of the efficacy of the applied therapies.

Alternative Therapies