What is Alternative Health Medicine?

You've heard the term alternative health medicine a million times on news and tv/radio shows, and your friends rant and rave that alternative health medicine (also called holistic or natural medicine) is so much better than traditional medicine. Even with all you have heard, you're just not sure what alternative health medicine is. In short, alternative health medicine is a therapy used to lessen, and possibly halt, the dependence on conventional man made drug treatments and surgeries.

Alternative health medicine is used in place of conventional medicine to treat common health issues and ailments. An example of natural therapy would be following a special diet to treat cancer instead of undergoing traditional medical treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation. The more popular evidence of alternative health medicine would be seeing a chiropractor or using an acupuncture method to reduce pain in your back, arms or body.

Mind-body interventions are also considered alternative health medicine. Examples of mind-body interventions are meditation, prayer and therapies that use things such as art and music. The mind-body intervention therapy part of alternative health medicine relies on the body to heal itself. It has been proven that you can reduce stress through meditation and prayer without the aid of prescriptions drugs such as antidepressants or tranquillizers.

Whether you choose chiropractic medicine, acupuncture, aromatherapy, mind-body interventions or homeopathic medicine, alternative health medicine is becoming more and more popular. There are now some (but still very few) insurance companies that have alternative health plans for those people that would like to try something other than traditional medicine. To find out more about available natural therapies, ask your physician or log onto a search engine such as Google and type in the key words alternative health medicine, natural health therapies or anything related. You can also speak to friends or family members that have used holistic medicine for their own health issues.

Should you choose any alternative medicine treatment, be sure to check out the clinic that you are going to visit and make sure they are licensed to practice alternative health therapy.

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Nature and evolution

Nature and evolution

Humans are not designed to be happy, or even content. Instead, we are designed primarily to survive and reproduce, like every other creature in the natural world. A state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival.

The fact that evolution has prioritised the development of a big frontal lobe in our brain (which gives us excellent executive and analytical abilities) over a natural ability to be happy, tells us a lot about nature’s priorities. Different geographical locations and circuits in the brain are each associated with certain neurological and intellectual functions, but happiness, being a mere construct with no neurological basis, cannot be found in the brain tissue.

In fact, experts in this field argue that nature’s failure to weed out depression in the evolutionary process (despite the obvious disadvantages in terms of survival and reproduction) is due precisely to the fact that depression as an adaptation plays a useful role in times of adversity, by helping the depressed individual disengage from risky and hopeless situations in which he or she cannot win. Depressive ruminations can also have a problem solving function during difficult times.

Brain lateralisation and handedness.

Brain lateralisation and handedness. 

It is true, however, that the brain’s right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere the right side – and that the hemispheres do actually have specialities. For example, language is usually processed a little bit more within the left hemisphere, and recognition of faces a little bit more within the right hemisphere. This idea that each hemisphere is specialised for some skills is known as brain lateralisation. However, the halves do not work in isolation, as a thick band of nerve fibres – called the corpus callosum – connects the two sides.

Interestingly, there are some known differences in these specialities between right-handers and left-handers. For example, it is often cited that around 95% of right-handers are “left hemisphere dominant”. This is not the same as the “left brain” claim above, it actually refers to the early finding that most right-handers depend more on the left hemisphere for speech and language. It was assumed that the opposite would be true for lefties. But this is not the case. In fact, 70% of left-handers also process language more in the left hemisphere. Why this number is lower, rather than reversed, is as yet unknown.

Researchers have found many other brain specialities, or “asymmetries” in addition to language. Many of these are specialised in the right hemisphere – in most right-handers at least – and include things such as face processing, spatial skills and perception of emotions. But these are understudied, perhaps because scientists have incorrectly assumed that they all depend on being in the hemisphere that isn’t dominant for language in each person.

In fact, this assumption, plus the recognition that a small number of left-handers have unusual right hemisphere brain dominance for language, means left-handers are either ignored – or worse, actively avoided – in many studies of the brain, because researchers assume that, as with language, all other asymmetries will be reduced.

How some of these functions are lateralised (specialised) in the brain can actually influence how we perceive things and so can be studied using simple perception tests. For example, in my research group’s recent study, we presented pictures of faces that were constructed so that one half of the face shows one emotion, while the other half shows a different emotion, to a large number of right-handers and left-handers.

Usually, people see the emotion shown on the left side of the face, and this is believed to reflect specialisation in the right hemisphere. This is linked to the fact that visual fields are processed in such a way there is a bias to the left side of space. This is thought to represent right hemisphere processing while a bias to the right side of space is thought to represent left hemisphere processing. We also presented different types of pictures and sounds, to examine several other specialisations.

Our findings suggest that some types of specialisations, including processing of faces, do seem to follow the interesting pattern seen for language (that is, more of the left-handers seemed to have a preference for the emotion shown on the right side of the face). But in another task that looked at biases in what we pay attention to, we found no differences in the brain-processing patterns for right-handers and left-handers. This result suggests that while there are relationships between handedness and some of the brain’s specialisations, there aren’t for others.

Left-handers are absolutely central to new experiments like this, but not just because they can help us understand what makes this minority different. Learning what makes left-handers different could also help us finally solve many of the long-standing neuropsychological mysteries of the brain.

          Humans aren’t designed to be                       happy – so stop trying 

A huge happiness and positive thinking industry, estimated to be worth US$11 billion a year, has helped to create the fantasy that happiness is a realistic goal. Chasing the happiness dream is a very American concept, exported to the rest of the world through popular culture. Indeed, “the pursuit of happiness” is one of the US’s “unalienable rights”. Unfortunately, this has helped to create an expectation that real life stubbornly refuses to deliver.

Because even when all our material and biological needs are satisfied, a state of sustained happiness will still remain a theoretical and elusive goal, as Abd-al-Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba in the tenth century, discovered. He was one of the most powerful men of his time, who enjoyed military and cultural achievements, as well as the earthly pleasures of his two harems. Towards the end of his life, however, he decided to count the exact number of days during which he had felt happy. They amounted to precisely 14.

Happiness, as the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes put it, is “like a feather flying in the air. It flies light, but not for very long.” Happiness is a human construct, an abstract idea with no equivalent in actual human experience. Positive and negative affects do reside in the brain, but sustained happiness has no biological basis. And – perhaps surprisingly – I reckon this is something to be happy about.

   

                              Thanks for Reading📖