Modern medicine is capable of amazing things: a course of pills can cure diseases that previously were fatal; surgeons can transplant organs, replace diseased joints and perform complicated keyhole surgery. Yet many people increasingly feel let down by medical science and are looking to alternative, or complementary therapies, to safeguard their health.
If you have a specific medical problem, the chances are that modern medicine can fix it or at least knows how to fix it. It is with the less specific problems, the long-term or chronic conditions that often do not have a single, easily identifiable cause or solution that modern medicine may find itself in difficulties.
Doctors are often under pressure to see, diagnose and treat more patients in less time. This can leave people feeling abandoned by the medical profession when doctors say they can do nothing more for them and yet the problem has not been solved.
There has been a rapid growth of interest in all kinds of complementary therapies in recent years. There is an increasing realization that the relationship between therapist and sufferer is part of the healing process and that, in its race for technical excellence, modern medicine sometimes forgets this. As a result, it is easy for sufferers to feel that they are being treated as collections of symptoms rather than as individuals.
A Partnership for Health
For many people, a major attraction of the complementary therapies is the empowerment they involve. Whereas the doctor-patient relationship usually entails the patient dutifully following a course of treatment, complementary therapies involve therapist and sufferer in a partnership of healing that explores all aspects of an individual’s well being.
Sufferers begin to understand how seemingly unrelated aspects of their life can affect their health in a negative way and how they can take positive action to improve the situation. Some complementary therapies, such as yoga and meditation, are suitable for use at home and are easily assimilated into daily life, helping to dispel the belief that healing is something done to you by someone “out there”.
Another attraction of many of the complementary therapies is their lack of serious side effects. This is an important consideration for people suffering from chronic conditions such as back pain.
Finally, while conventional medicine can often do little to help people with problems such as back pain, research projects have shown that complementary therapies work. For example, a two-year study in the United Kingdom, published in the British Medical journal, compared the effects of chiropractic and standard hospital out-patient treatment on 750 people with severe or chronic back pain. Those treated by chiropractors reported greater improvements in their condition than those who did not receive this treatment.
It’s Your Choice
The aim of this article is not to advocate complementary therapies over conventional medical care. Its intention is to introduce you, as a back-pain sufferer, to the range of treatments – conventional and complementary – that is available. Many back-pain sufferers find that a mixture of therapies works best, hence the term “complementary” therapies.
It is important to remember that some causes of back pain, such as disc or nerve root problems, always need initial investigation and treatment by a medical doctor. However, even in these cases complementary therapies can play an invaluable role in helping to relieve symptoms and speed recovery.
