Alternative medicine defined

According to the passage, which practice would not be defined as alternative medicine ... 

Most proponents of the field would like to define alternative medicine as the art of using safe, natural methods to get to the root of problems, help the body to heal itself, and prevent diseases before they arise. While this definition sounds beautiful, it is a pure romance. Alternative medicine seldom achieves such an idealized standard. 

Figure 1 Five major CAM domains. NCCAM defines complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practices as those not presently considered an integral part of conventional medicine. As CAM modalities are proven safe and effective, they may become adopted into mainstream medical practice. The five areas shown in the schematic represent but one way to array CAM approaches. Examples in each area are provided below (see NCCAM strategic plan at http //www.nccam.nih.gov for more details) ... 

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a broad domain of healing resources that encompass all health systems, practices, accompanying theories and beliefs, other than those intrinsic to the politically dominant health system of a particular society or culture, within a defined historical period. CAM includes all such practices and ideas self-defined by their users for prevention or treatment of disease, or promotion of health and well being. Boundaries within CAM and between the CAM domain and that of the dominant system are not always sharp or fixed . 

Finally, a randomised comparative trial with one alternative marketed medicine can only address the choice between the two. Other comparative trials with other treatments build up a picture of overall therapeutic benefit and risk, and these trials may help to define groups of study subjects who differ in their response from the general population. 

As noted above, all available information on the historical use of botanical preparations will be accepted for safety consideration. But for FDA clinical reviewers, such experiences are often poorly documented and difficult to interpret or correlate with the paradigm of conventional (Western) medicine. In the alternative medical system, almost all the diagnoses to be treated with herbal medicine are defined in imprecise and foreign terms. Typically, one herbal medicine is indicated for numerous seemingly unrelated conditions, most of which are symptomatic relief without clear mechanisms. Furthermore, many botanicals are combinations of multiple herbs, but few references are available for the rationale of combining so many ingredients. 

Peptide libraries made up of millions of randomized peptide sequences have proven useful for the identification of novel ligands that may be of interest for the development of medicinally active compounds.[123,124] However, due to the short length of the individual peptides in linear peptide libraries, they possess considerable conformational flexibility and can populate multiple random-like conformations. This flexibility does not allow one to determine the precise three-dimensional orientation of the side chains, which greatly impedes structure-based design. These facts have greatly accelerated studies into conformationally restricted libraries, where constraints have been introduced to decrease peptide flexibility. However, what is really required is the design of conformationally defined and constrained templates for library display. These templates present the side chains of selected residues in a defined three-dimensional space. Thus, as an alternative to linear peptide libraries, the well-char-... 

Demographic surveys of many alternative or complementary medicines have been conducted in a range of locations, but there is usually a problem in clearly defining and categorizing individual types of product however, the usual outcome of these surveys is that the typical patient is middle-aged, middle-income, and female. One recent survey carried out in Washington State, United States, on patients aged 50-76 established the prevalence of their medical conditions, and prevalence of use of a number of nutraceuticals by both men (n = 29,435) and women (n = 32,152). Table 3 outlines the incidence of diseases treated with nutraceuticals. 

A MA for a herbal medicinal product may be submitted, as for any medicinal product, through a full application with new tests and trials, whenever the application refers to a new product or a therapeutic innovation. Alternatively, for a well-established drug (defined in Directive 99/83) a bibliographic application may be submitted, when safety and efficacy for a given indication, dose and patient population are satisfactorily described in the published literature. 

The past twenty years have seen a dramatic increase in the popularity and use of various complementary or alternative therapies. These can be referred to by many different names such as unorthodox, natural, fringe, complementary or alternative. In 1993 the British Medical Association in its report on Complementary Medicine used the term non-conventional therapies which it defined as those forms of treatment which are not widely used by the orthodox health-care professions and the skills of which are not taupfht as part of the underptraduate curriculum of orthodox medical and paramedical healthcare courses . 

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