Western medicine is a system in which medical doctors and other healthcare professionals (such as nurses, pharmacists, and therapists) treat symptoms and diseases using drugs, radiation, or surgery. Also called allopathic medicine, biomedicine, conventional medicine, mainstream medicine, and orthodox medicine.

Allopathic medicine is more commonly called western medicine. When selecting your own approach to maintaining health and treating disease, it is important to understand the basic concepts and philosophy that underlie the western medical approach to treating long-term disease.

Three basic concepts guide the western medical approach to the treatment of disease: 

1. To understand and eliminate the cause of the disease

2. To treat the disease with medicines that have been shown to be effective in controlled, scientific studies and have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

3. To improve the patient’s quality of life by relieving their symptoms, even if the disease is resistant to therapy

The goal of western medicine is to intervene with effective measures of eliminating the source of disease, thus promoting healing. Overall, western medicine focuses on pathology and curing disease while alternative medicine focuses on the health and healing of the person

The goal of western medical doctors in treating people with long-term disease or condition is to:

* Diagnose the disease.

* Stop disease progression.

* Relieve the symptoms associated with the disease,

* Prevent the spread of the disease.

* Cure the disease (if a cure is available)

* Improve quality of life.

Allopathic medicine is based on an understanding of the causes of disease and eliminating those causes.

Western physicians make decisions about which treatment will be most helpful to their patients based on controlled, scientific studies. This approach is known as evidence-based medicine.

The studies used to gather evidence about what is and is not effective are called clinical trials. In clinical trials, a new drug or treatment is compared to a placebo (an inactive pill or treatment) or to the best currently available therapy. These trials are conducted to avoid the possibility of misinterpreting a patient’s improvement as resulting from a particular treatment when it was actually due to the natural course of the disease, spontaneous improvement, or coincidence.

Most western doctors have had the experience of a new drug or therapy producing almost miraculous results in one person, only to find it to be a total disappointment in many other people. While it is possible that the treatment was the cause of the improvement in these cases, it is more likely that the improvement would have occurred without any therapy. The apparent benefit was a coincidence of timing, that is, the treatment was started just before the person was about to improve on his or her own.

Western Medicine excels in the area of testing and diagnostics. The vast majority of individuals in this country who are living with long-term illness received their diagnosis from a doctor practicing western medicine. Regardless of any other components you choose to include in your plan, use the best tests and diagnostics that western medicine has to offer.