Revealing the True Potency of the Underestimated Alternative Healing Method

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As someone who lives in a big city, I can feel that the trust to Alternative Healing Methods (AHM) is slowly decreasing. And I believe that most of you feel the same thing. Being born from a Dayak (the name of a native tribe in Borneo) mother, I was told about many plants / herbal medicines that can be used to heal specific diseases. In Asian traditional cultures, the role of herbs to cure a certain disease has been passed from generation to generation. Sadly, along with modernization, the trust level to the Alternative Healing Methods is decreasing. Along with the rise of the income level, people nowadays prefer to seek medical treatment from a medical professional rather than an alternative practitioner. While actually this is not bad, since the education curriculum that must be accomplished by medical students are standardized as well as the medicines used for treatment and cure, modern medicines are also based on research and evidence. Some other Sciences, i.e. Physics, Chemistry, Informatics, even Robotics have also given some contributions to the development of the Modern Medical Science.  

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With its rapid progress and improvement, it is understandable why Alternative Healing Methods is oftentimes underestimated by the Modern Medical Science. Sometimes, there is also a rivalism between Modern Medical Science and Alternative Healing Methods. 

There are several methods that can be classified into Alternative Healing Methods, such as : chiropractic, osteopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), naturopathy, iridology, kinesiology, reflexology, homeopathy, acupuncture, massage therapy, chikung / qìgōng, taichi, aromatherapy, and so many more. Some Alternative Healing Methods are difficult to standardized and some others are rejected by Modern Medical Science just because it looks 'not scientific'.

If the modern world rejects something just because it doesn't fit with logic, then how does Modern Medical Science explain about demon-possessed phenomena? How do Science and logic explain about fire soccer game played in Indonesia? Some Alternative Healing Methods even involve ritual, which is hard to understand with logic ; while others involve 'treatment', for example acupuncture, reflexology, and herbal medicines. Since the Alternative Healing Methods and Modern Medical Science have different perspective about health itself, of course it may be difficult to understand each other. 

 

The history of humankind began since the prehistoric era, some 2.8 million years ago. That time, Homo habilis is considered as the ancestor of modern human (Homo sapiens) that started to exist some 200,000 years ago until now. It's undeniably that, we can be here and reading this article now, because our ancestor and great-great ancestor had followed the basic instinct to survive, which was manifested in many ways, from living in groups, finding safe places to live, developing early tools to make their work easier, domesticating dogs, and of course, learning the art of healing. A study about Ngangkari tribe (Aboriginal sub-tribe) from Australia has revealed that they have practiced their natural healing method at least for 60,000 years. Therefore, it makes sense to say that the Alternative Healing Methods have been existed for several hundred thousands of years, if not millions of years. This is much much longer than the Modern Medical Science, that has just started slightly more than 100 years ago. Some important timelines are given in the chart below.

The introduction of Scientific Method is believed to give the first influence to
Modern Medical Science. Along with Statistics, Pharmacy, and other Sciences, these make Modern Medical Science only acknowledge the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). Sadly, with its arrogance, Modern Medical Science refuses to acknowledge the Alternative Healing Methods simply because they are scientifically not proven ; despite some facts that methods like acupuncture has more successful rate in treating stroke patients, for example. But well, just because statistically this method cannot be analyzed, then the Alternative Healing Methods are labeled as 'scientifically not proven'.

(coining is a common practice in South East

Asian to relieve cold symptoms)

To be 'scientifically proven', a method or drugs must pass the series of processes called clinical test. A clinical test is basically a statistical analysis with many data. The more the number of samples (participants) the more reliable the drugs' claim will be. This is the basic of Statistics. Statistical analysis is based on Scientific Method, and during middle or high school we know that to perform an experiment we need two groups so that we can analyze whether our 'treatment' has an effect or not. Those two groups are called experimental groups and control group. In medical 'experiment' (OK, they call it clinical trials), the control group receives what is called the placebo. Placebo is a substance or treatment which is designed to have no therapeutic value (Wikipedia definition). Imagine 100 people get a capsule each to treat headache. Or, imagine there are 100 people who get a vaccine to prevent from coronavirus infection. 50% are placebo. The person with placebo may develop a suggestion (belief) that their treatment is real, hence developing a reaction [that can be] similar to the person with 'real treatment'. In my [and your] understanding, would this 'scientifically designed experiment' produce more BIAS, if compared to statistical analysis conducted on Alternative Healing Methods? 

 

If we want to, say, find out whether aromatherapy or music therapy can reduce stress or not, then we can just expose the experimental group with the 'treatment' (i.e. music / scent) then do nothing to the control group, then compare the result. What result? The stress level. So, the design experiment is so easy, and so does interpreting / analyzing the results. But, how do we 'measure' stress level? Using a questionnaire. Wait, but how can we compare stress levels between the participants? Questionnaire is too subjective and not objective, so the result is not scientifically accepted. So, do you get what I mean?

 

Modern Medical Science is very familiar with the word standardization, which is a good thing sometimes. If you want to buy 500 mg of paracetamol in Philippines, or Arab, or Korea, or Kenya, you will get the same medicine with the same specification. Well, except in Japan, since they don't normally sell paracetamol but Loxonin instead. So, even for vitamin C that can easily be obtained from fruits, vitamin C sold as supplements are made from chemical process, not extracted from fruits naturally. Why? The reason is, standardization or consistency. Vitamin C that is made synthetically can have a certain (desired) value of concentration, so the concentration is easily monitored / adjusted and the presence of unwanted substances can easily be controlled as well. With the same reasons, most of medicines, antibiotics, and some supplements are synthesized chemically even though they can be found in nature. However, there are many steps required before a health product can be produced commercially. This is to assure that the product is safe to consume ; or at least can identify some problems that may arise with the consumption of the product. These steps requires a thorough research and trials, and of course requires a lot of time, money, effort, and patience. The stages of a new drug development is given as follow.

 

 

From the discovery of a new potential drugs until its mass production, it can take roughly 12 years and US$ 150 million, and this excludes the money required to build the factory facilities, marketing and training fee, business development fee, etc. So, [let's say] during the discovery of a new antibiotic, scientists will first do the early activity test or activity confirmation test from mold sample in a petri dish. Then, if it shows a good result, they will purify its components one-by-one, then repeat the activity test using [nearly] each of the components. 

 

 

Finding which component[s] that may work requires trial and error process. It's like opening a door with a pile of keys. Sometimes, there are more than one key that can be used to open the door. Component[s] which show good results will be analyzed to see their chemical structures. Then, the chemists will devise a mechanism of reactions in order to 'duplicate' the useful substance[s] synthetically. These steps are parts of the discovery stage. After the discovery stage, the medicine will enter the pre-clinical examination stage, where the medicine is tested to a non-human subject. The last stage is called clinical examination stage or clinical drugs testing, and is divided into phases 0 until III (ideally until phase IV). 

 

(stages required from discovery to launching of a new drug) 

 

Most of antibiotics are discovered and produced using these stages. Antibiotics are usually produced by fungus as secondary metabolite byproducts. Since fungus usually produces few substances only, the separation and purification process is not too difficult. What seems more difficult is to find which component[s] that can be used to kill bacteria, or finding the target bacteria that can be killed with the antibiotic. With the rise of informatics and information technology, the discovery stage can be done at a shorter period of time with the help of CADD (Computer-Aided Drugs Design) software. Once the structure of the medicine is found, Chemists just need to 'produce' a substance with the structure as devised by the CADD, then the activity test can be done afterward. 

However, producing a modern medicine from herbal plants (i.e. Traditional Chinese Medicine) is very complicated. Herbal medicines usually consists of combinations of several herbs ; at which each herb itself contains many chemical compounds. Thus, one set of herbs combination may contain as many as 80 to hundreds of compounds. Consequently, the separation and purification process of each compound present in the mixture will not be easy. Moreover, even though the herbal mixtures can have a healing effect as a whole combination, but when the compounds are separated and purified, it is still possible that the outcomes are not satisfactory. The reason is, many compounds in herbal mixture may interact one another to produce the desired healing effect ; while this healing effect cannot be confirmed (or will not be optimum) if the compound present is tested one by one seperately. Therefore, if scientists cannot find out how many key compounds are required to produce the desired healing effect, then the modern version of the herbal plants will be nearly impossible to make. For illustration, if there are 30 compounds present and only 6 of them can synergycally work to show a desired healing effect -- if you have learnt about permutation & combination in Mathematics -- you will find that it will demand more than 590,000 trials just to find the perfect combination, and this number excludes the repetition (a good scientific experiment must be repeated several times). While even doing one single experiment may take a lot of time, this investigative trials to find the 'perfect combination' will take a whole lifetime, literally, and not to mention the amount of money required. And we are only talking about the discovery stage.

 

(it is much easier to choose 6 players from 30 available candidates

than to find a perfect combination of 6 compounds from 30 compounds)

 

With the outspread of the coronavirus, the Modern Medical Science now face a great challenge. The development of a new drug takes about 8 - 12 years, and we cannot wait that long. Moreover, it seems that CoV-SARS2 is able to experience mutation in a relatively short period of time, just like influenzavirus. Modern Medical Science that usually produces  'standardized drugs' now is facing the reality that this virus seems cannot be taken down by one kind of drug (compound) alone. Just like MDR-TB (Multi-Drugs Resistant Tuberculosis) bacteria that has already developed immunity against many antibiotics. These pathogens must be handled using different approaches, and probably requires what is called the 'integrated complementary healing approach' ; the collaboration between modern and alternative methods.

Some countries like Germany have already pay more attention to the development of the Alternative Healing Methods as a complementary to the modern medicine. Some fields of the Alternative Healing Methods that receive attention are homeopathy and heat therapy. While we do not know what the future pathogens will look like, rather than competing each other, it would be better if both Alternative Healing Methods and Modern Medical Science can collaborate, for the future of humankind.

 

(collaboration is better than competition)

 

Thank you for reading my blog. If you are interested, I am also selling immuno-modulator supplements that can prevent the viral infection, in some cases even can help immunity to fight-of viral infection.

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Please visit about us for more information about the products and how to order.

 

References :

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-21/schwager-war-against-natural-medicine/3840682

https://www.antac.org.au/ngangkai-services/workshops/bush-medicine-workshops

https://joyfulcacophony.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/why-i-believe-alternative-medicine-will-become-mainstream-before-i-die/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170418/ 

https://nodawaynews.com/why-your-immune-system-and-most-prescription-drugs-cant-kill-mold/

https://www.nature.com/articles/ja2016121