In today’s day and age, the increasing awareness by most Westerners of alternative medicine and alternative healing, has shown a surge in the medical industry. Many still question the power of alternative healing, but what one should maybe rather be asking is who are, according to statistics, the healthier populations that live the longest and healthiest?

Although most scholars still question and critic alternative medicine, the benefits of an alternative lifestyle show that there is without question, some advantage to it.

Different types of Alternative healing

There are five major kinds of alternative healing in practice. They are: alternative medical systems, mind-body techniques, biologically based therapies, body-based therapies and energy healing.

Alternative Medical Systems

Alternative Medical Systems include treatments such as traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, ayurveda, homeopathy and naturopathy. Alternative Medical Systems also include unconventional Western practices of natural healing.

Traditional Chinese medicine, for instance, originated thousands of years ago and is the belief system that all illness is due to the result of improper flow of life force, or better known as "qi", through the body. Only when the qi is restored and balanced through herbal remedies, massage, meditation and acupuncture, can the body function as per normal again.

Mind-body Techniques

The theory with mind-body techniques is that there’s a connection between the mental and emotional influence over your physical health. There is a profusion of evidence that proves that this is more than theory and the benefit of this is that there are few risks involved. The treatments that generally falls under this category is: meditation, relaxation techniques, guided imagery, hypnotherapy, biofeedback and cognitive-behavioural therapy.

Meditation for example is a method focusing specifically on stilling the mind. With this comes the allowance for greater self-awareness. Although originally most meditation practices were developed within religious or spiritual context, it is commonly used today as a health care intervention. Meditation has proven many health benefits, but the most common factor being that it relieves stress and pain, which ultimately guides to a happier and healthier way of living.

Biologically Based Therapies

In the instance of biologically based therapies, it involves the use of chemicals, from which almost all are derived from natural sources. The most common amongst these kind of therapies are: herbal medicine and orthomolecular medicine.

Orthomolecular medicine focuses on the proper nutrition to sustain and restore health. The therapy focuses on supplementing the diet with the necessary vitamins. Some of the orthomolecular treatments even use shark cartilage for cancer treatment. Chelation therapy, which is the removal of toxic materials from the bloodstream, is used to help treat cardiovascular diseases, and glucosamine or chondroitin, both substances which occurs naturally in the body, to treat osteoarthritis. Its effectiveness has been proven most successfully.

Body-Based Therapies

As the name explains, this is alternative healing techniques that treat conditions through body manipulation. The most common practice being chiropractic, massage therapy, rolfing, postural reduction and reflexology.

With reflexology, pressure massaging is applied to the bottom of the foot where the corresponding meridian points are located of different organs and systems of the body. Through massage stimulation on these areas, it is believed to eliminate blockages of energy that is responsible for pain or disease in the corresponding body part.

Energy Therapies

Energy therapies work through the energy fields through-out the body, otherwise known as biofields. With this practitioners can open blockages and influence health and healing through electromagnetic fields. Bioelectromagnetic-based therapy, reiki, therapeutic touch and manual nerve release are of the most common practices in this field.

Manual nerve release, also known as MNR, is one of the few hands-on treatments where electromagnetic heat is used to identify and treat the origin of pain. Through manual nerve release, you are relieved of pain, muscle spasms, organ blockages, arthritis, certain types of muscle lameness and Parkinson’s syndrome, permanently by locating the source of inflammation, pain and blockage. There are very few people that practice this non-invasive technique.

The power of alternative healing shows. There are even many traditional Western practitioners who make use of alternative healing in their own practises. In 1980, The World Health Organization also confirmed 43 types of pathologies which were successfully treated with acupuncture. The advantages of alternative healing just seems to be more positive and the benefit being that the side effects are minimal.