Complementary health care

Do not take non-prescription medications or herbal/alternativa/complementary medicines without notifying your physician, pharmacist, and/or health care team members. 

Health-care providers, clinical laboratory personnel, infection control professionals, and health departments play critical and complementary roles in recognizing and responding to illnesses caused by intentional release of biologic agents. The syndrome descriptions, epidemiologic clues, and laboratory recommendations in this report provide basic guidance that can be implemented immediately to improve recognition of these events. 

In many developing countries of the world, there is still a major reliance on crude drug preparation of plants used in traditional medicines for their primary health care. Pharmacognosists employed in the different institutions are aware of the changing trends of herbal medications and a number of useful texts on the analysis, uses, and potential toxicities of herbal remedies have appeared recently, which serves as useful guides in pharmacy practice. The history of medicine includes many ludicrous therapies. Nevertheless, ancient wisdom has been the basis of modem medicine and will remain as one important source of future medicine and therapeutics. The future of natural products drug discovery will be more holistic, personahzed and involve the wise use of ancient and modem therapeutic skills in a complementary manner so that maximum benefits can be accmed to the patients and the community. 

Clinical pharmacology plays no less significant a role in primary health care. That includes emphasis on essential drugs, safe and rational use of essential medicines including their side effects and outcomes, drug data transmission and analysis, and training with emphasis on prevalent diseases. Interactions between orthodox and traditional (complementary) medicines are carefully considered. Cost-benefit analysis is made possible. 

Product stability and compatibility with the conditioning material are distinct, separate, and complementary concepts which should be applied to the pharmaceutical product before being made available for health care. 

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practices can be described as those not currently considered to be an integral part of conventional medicine. As CAM practices are proven safe and effective, they may become integrated into mainstream medicine. The majority of patients use CAM approaches to complement conventional health care, rather than as an alternative to it (1). CAM practices can be grouped into five major domains (Figure 1). 

Ten years ago I worked as a consultant to a dozen medical practitioners. Now, I regularly consult with more than 120 physicians. Why In part, it is because I am better known The more important reason is that most physicians know very little about herbal medicine, and their patients, in large numbers, are now taking herbal products. In fact, a recent consumer research survey released in 1998 reported that 42 percent of the people polled used some form of alternative medicine. The survey also noted that 75 percent of the people said they would be likely to use herbal medicine, and 74 percent of those reporting the use of alternative medical said they used it along with conventional health care. Of those people, 61 percent reported that their physicians were aware of these complementary treatments. 

Little is known about the efficacy of herbal products in infants, children, and adolescents. Health care professionals must ask caregivers specifically about the use of complementary and alternative treatments to minimize the adverse effects and costs associated with ineffective therapies. 

Women often seek relief for premenstrual and perimenopausal symptoms from alternative or nontraditional treatments without consulting their health care providers. Herbal therapies, phytoestrogens, progesterone creams, megavitamins, folk remedies, and homeopathy are marketed to women without scientific evidence of efficacy or safety. Clinicians should ask women if they use alternative/ complementary therapies and become familiar with the products (e.g., mechanism of action, efficacy, dosing, side effects, monitoring, and drug-herb and herb-herb interactions). 

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 . 

Co-payment systems usually serve three complementary purposes. Firstly, they obhge patients to finance part of the costs of their medication thereby decreasing the financial burden on society. Secondly, they make patients more aware of the costs of health care. Thirdly, they discourage patients from using too many or excessively expensive medicines. Co-payments are generally used in combination with a... 

Beal, M.W. 1998. Women s use of complementary and alternative therapies in reproductive health care. /. Nurse-Midioifery 43 (3) 224-234. 

Immunologic Medsafe of New Zealand has advised health-care professionals to consider the uncertain benefits of propohs versus the risk of hypersensitivity reactions or renal failure before recommending its use to patients [51, 52, 53 ]. A review of adverse reactions identified several cases of hypersensitivity reactions in people using complementary medicines containing propolis patients with a history of allergies were at particular risk. 

Bloom, B. S., Retbi, A., Dahan, S. and Jonsson, E. 2000, Evaluation of randomised controlled trials on complementary and alternative medicine , International Journal of Technological Assessment of Health Care 16 13-21. 

It is hoped that aromatherapists do not try to convince their patients of a cure, especially in the case of serious ailments such as cancer, which often recede naturally for a time on their own. Conventional treatment should always be advised in the rst instance and retained during aromatherapy treatment with the consent of the patient s primary health care physician or consultant. Aromatherapy can provide a useful complementary medical service both in healthcare settings and in private practice and should not be allowed to become listed as a bogus cure in alternative medicine. 

Ni H, Simile C, Hardy AM. Utilization of complementary and alternative medicine by United States adults results from the 1999 national health interview survey. Med Care 2002 40(4) 353-358. 

Often called complementary and alternative medicine, this group of medical practices has also been termed unconventional, unorthodox, unproven, and even quackery. Because these terms have significant negative connotations, terms such as alternative medicine are preferred. Alternative medicine is not one form of medicine, but rather a diverse group of health practices that are outside of what is considered usual or conventional by the medical establishment. Alternative medicine spans the range of practices, from home remedies to manufactured products, from patient self-treatment to care by a skilled practitioner, from efficacious to potentially dangerous. Specific definitions of more common alternative medicine practices used in the United States are listed in Table 1. ... 

A variety of biomarkers have been shown to be valuable individually for one or several toxicant or disease situations. Few of these biomarkers have been systematically evaluated for the plethora of situations that might provoke false positive responses. Acceleration of the current pace of biomarker evaluation and qualification demands (a) the availability of panels of biomarker-assays that can be comparatively evaluated on well-defined common sample sets, (b) fit-for-purpose performance evaluation in controlled animal studies with carefully benchmarked histological endpoints and samples from well-defined focused clinical trial cohorts, and (c) ready availability of banked blood and urine sample archives from clinical trial populations with carefully documented morbidities such as the Framingham Heart Study,45 or the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network (DILIN) prospective study,46 to name a few. Availability of such panels of validated biomarker assays and well-documented preclinical and clinical samples, as well as increased cooperation between animal model researchers and clinical researchers will enable individual biomarkers to be qualified for sensitivity of specifically defined adverse events, qualified for appropriate specificity using samples of defined benign events, and collected into panels that yield complementary information about the health and safety of animals and patients. 

---