Complementary Therapies

What are Complementary Therapies?

Have you ever seen that advert on television where a bewildered woman is lying naked on a massage table and a rather odd looking man is walking around the table slapping the poor woman with a huge and slimy dead fish?

That is how some people view complementary therapies.

If you look up complementary in the dictionary you will find a different meaning. Complementary means to “complete the whole”. In relation to Complementary Therapies, it means to act “in support” or as an adjunct.

Complementary Therapies are NOT alternate or alternative therapies. They are not “instead of” conventional therapies, but in “addition to”, in order to address the “whole person”.

This is where the suspicion of Complementary Therapies originates, predominantly from conventional therapists who practice within the bio medical model and who consider therapies that sit ‘outside’ of this model as ‘quackery’, however slowly things are changing.

As we have embraced the need to view a patient or client as a “whole”, incorporating their emotional, psychological, spiritual, social and cultural needs in addition to and alongside their physical needs, we are gradually understanding that conventional approaches to health and illness do not meet the needs of the ‘whole person’ .

It’s interesting to note that in the late 19th, early 20th century, Freud was considered a ‘quack’ by many of his medical colleagues, because he dealt with the psychological aspects of a person and this was considered ‘alternative’. Immunisations, vaccinations and antibiotics were considered ‘alternative’ when they were first being employed to fight disease. It’s no surprise that throughout the course of history, any therapy that challenged the conventional wisdom of the time was regarded as alternative and the practitioners of the therapy ridiculed and often alienated, because they were seen as a threat by the mainstream practitioners of the day. Hence we saw midwives burned as witches because they employed homeopathy, naturopathy and herbal medicine. We saw energy therapists viewed as sorcerers and practitioners of acupuncture and shiatsu viewed as culturally inferior in the western world. This was despite the western practices of ‘leeching’ to ‘bleed the patient of bad humours’ and surgical interventions for medical diseases.

I like to believe we have come a long way since the ‘bad old days’ of prejudice and suspicion; however there are still those in the mainstream health environment who look on complementary therapies as a ‘sugar pill’ for patients who will not take their diagnosis ‘lying down’. There are however, a large and growing number of health professionals who see the enormous benefit in maintaining health and vitality by preventative therapies that encourage ‘wellness’ and holistic health. There are many who understand the importance of a holistic approach to disease and the need to assist patients to consider the influence of their emotional, social, spiritual, psychological and cultural aspects on their physical health. We are at last moving towards a focus on ‘ease’ as opposed to ‘dis ease’. We are at last understanding that medication is not the only thing to prescribe for pain, but that meditation, exercise, energy therapies, massage, herbs and a myriad of other complementary therapies, may augment the action of medication or be used in differing combinations in preference to medication. We at last understand the impact of psychological and emotional stress, spiritual distress, cultural customs and availability of social supports on a person’s pain experience. Now with the emergence of scientific evidence of the power of the mind as defined in “Quantum Physics” we are at the threshold of a new and vibrant understanding of health in both mind and body and an understanding of our capacity to create a world of our choosing rather than be forced into the world Isaac Newton taught us was mechanical and pre-destined.

Complementary Therapies are a part of this new approach to health and well being, where we are able to choose the therapies that we feel meet our needs and the use of a combination of these therapies will soon be commonplace.

I intend to explore a range of these therapies here for you and provide you with additional resources so you can embark on your own learning and healing journey.

You will find a number of links to relevant sites on the links page of this website.