Читать книгу Energy Medicine - C. Norman Shealy - Страница 11

What we call modern medicine or conventional medicine has only developed primarily over the last sixty to seventy years. Prior to that, we had some surgical procedures, very few drugs, a few herbs, and a lot of dangerous or outmoded approaches such as bloodletting and leeches. Admittedly, maggots have recently been reintroduced to be used in cleaning up certain kinds of wounds, but to a large extent modern medicine has been essentially based upon chemistry with a little bit of simple physics thrown in, such as surgery and some manipulative approaches. Although everything in medicine involves energy of some kind, for the purposes of this book and the general field of Energy Medicine, none of the conventional medical approaches of drugs, surgeries, etc., will be considered.

With that said, it may surprise some readers to know that the federal government acknowledges a number of disciplines that employ energy medicine. Interestingly, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has formally listed ten major Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) approaches:

1. Nutrition and Life Style: diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management

2. Mind/Body Medicine: including hypnosis and a wide variety of mind-focused approaches, such as meditation

3. Alternative systems of medical thought: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), kampo, Tibetan medicine, and acupuncture

4. Yoga, ayurvedic medical systems, Native American, and Yoruba-based medicine

5. Alternative Systems of Medical Thought: homeopathy and flower essences

6. Bioenergetic Medicine: evaluating the intrinsic body energy to measure and treat disorders

7. Pharmacologic/Biologically Based: herbal medicine

8. Pharmacologic/Biologically Based: nutrition, dietary supplements, and vitamins

9. Manipulative Therapies: chiropractic, osteopathic

10. Manipulative Therapies: massage

To a greater or lesser extent, virtually all of these ten certainly would be considered ancillary, complementary, and outside conventional medicine. However, they fall under the broadest rubric of Energy Medicine itself.