The relationship between conventional and alternative medicine is wary at best. What is needed is expanded medicine, which encompasses the best that both kinds of medicine have to offer.
I might as well begin by being blunt. There is no love lost between the medicine I was taught in medical school and the kind I practice now, which used to travel under the name of mind-body medicine. It acquired ayurveda (the traditional medicine of India) along the way and now incorporates influences from many other strains of healing. The relationship between conventional and alternative medicine is like a bad marriage, only in reverse. It began with a divorce, has moved to the stage of wary mediation, and holds some prospects of reaching a shy courtship some day in the future. Continue reading: American Medical Association Journal of Ethics