Alternative Medicine

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Alternative Medicine

Scientific medicine made enormous progress throughout the twentieth century. The steady improvement of pharmaceutics, surgical techniques, and biotechnology has given humans control over diseases that would have led to untimely death just a generation or two before. Yet for all the progress that scientific medicine has made, millions of twenty-first-century Americans are still enthusiastic adherents of alternative medicine. Some persons are motivated to explore alternative medicine out of sheer desperation. After all, alternative medicine provides hope for those whose pains (e.g., lingering back pain) do not fall under the purview of conventional medicine or who have a terminal illness and have already exhausted all conventional treatment options. Alternative medicine is, furthermore, less likely to be as invasive or to assault the body with heavy doses of drugs as scientific medicine often does. Alternative medicine is usually less expensive and also tends to establish warm personal relationships between healers and patients, thus appealing to those who are turned off by the bureaucratic impersonality of modern hospitals. Furthermore, alternative medicine is especially prevalent among recent immigrants or ethnic groups who have preserved cultural traditions that do not understand issues of health and illness in the same way as scientific medicine does.

What is striking, however, is the great extent to which Americans have become interested in alternative medicine for spiritual reasons. Beginning in the nineteenth century with unorthodox medical systems such as mesmerism, hydropathy, homeopathy, and mind cure, Americans have found alternative medicine to have spiritually edifying interpretations of mind-body-spirit interaction. After all, most alternative medicine is embedded in belief systems that affirm the existence of energies or forces not recognized by scientific medicine. Health is typically understood to be the result of achieving harmony with these more-than-physical energies. In short, unorthodox healing systems are not only purveying alternative medical treatments, but alternative spiritual philosophies as well. The religious and cultural significance of these "alternative" interpretations of body-mind-spirit interaction often has as much to do with the popularity of alternative medicine as with its ability to heal.

The sheer diversity of healing systems that are lumped together under the category of alternative medicine makes it somewhat difficult to make tidy generalizations about their connection with American religious life. We might begin, however, by suggesting that alternative medicine systems can be arranged along a philosophical or religious continuum. On one end of the continuum are those healing systems that have no overtly supernatural or metaphysical elements. Many dietary, exercise, and botanical healing systems fall into this category. They are considered alternative simply because their therapies have not yet been validated as efficacious by scientific researchers. Yet even though these therapies do not propound belief in more-than-physical energies, they nonetheless frequently invoke attitudes and outlooks that can be classified as belonging to American "nature religion"—that is, alternative medicine systems characteristically profess belief in the recuperative and progressive forces inherent in nature. Believing nature to be the handiwork of God, many alternative therapies suggest that nature, not a credentialed doctor, is the source of all healing. Thus even nonmetaphysical healing systems often articulate a form of moral and religious piety based on belief in the sanctity of nature's own restorative powers.

The other end of the philosophical continuum along which alternative medicine systems might be arranged is more frankly supernatural or metaphysical. These healing groups overtly profess belief in the existence of some invisible, spiritual power capable of promoting healing within the human body. Since the Transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century, American nature religion has also tended to foster the belief that, under special conditions, energies from higher spiritual dimensions can flow into—and exert influences on—our natural universe. The majority of alternative healing systems incorporate some degree of this metaphysical belief. This is especially true of "manipulative" therapies such as traditional chiropractic medicine, acupuncture, Therapeutic Touch, and shiatsu. Many "mind over matter" healing systems such as meditational practices, twelve-step programs, and power-of-positive-thinking therapies also rely heavily on metaphysical beliefs. So, too, do most New Age healing practices, such as those that draw on Eastern religious beliefs in "subtle energies" and those that claim to awaken our dormant psychic abilities to draw on the energies from our astral bodies.

The early history of chiropractic medicine provides an excellent example of how alternative medicine systems provide patients with a spiritually significant way of viewing the world. Daniel David Palmer was a grocer and fish peddler in Iowa before he began the study of the nineteenth-century metaphysical healing system known as mesmerism. Palmer soon learned that he could heal persons by using his hands to apply pressure to their spinal vertebrae. However physical his methods were, Palmer's philosophical explanation was entirely metaphysical. He reasoned that there is an intelligent spiritual force that pervades the entire universe and which he chose to call Innate Intelligence. Disease develops whenever Innate Intelligence is blocked from flowing freely through the human nervous system. The manipulative therapy that Palmer designed was thus understood to be a means of aligning people to make them more receptive to the working of a higher spiritual power. Over the years, the majority of chiropractic physicians downplayed their metaphysical origins to gain both scientific respectability and access to both governmentand insurance-sponsored programs. Thus while some chiropractic physicians continue to champion a decidedly metaphysical understanding of the healing process, others have muted the supernatural elements in favor of the more restrained form of nature religion that reverences the revitalizing powers inherent in the natural order. Today more than nine million persons visit chiropractic physicians each year. And while some of these persons go for reasons wholly unrelated to chiropractic's spiritual underpinnings, others are eager to be introduced to a spiritually charged philosophy concerning every person's inner connection with the spiritual power that radiates life and health throughout the entire universe.

What is commonly referred to as the New Age movement has also encouraged Americans to explore alternative medical systems. The various philosophies and practices that make up the New Age movement all endorse an approach to health and medicine that is said to be holistic and that envisions every human being as a unique, interdependent relationship of body, mind, emotions, and spirit. New Agers are for this reason critical of the Western scientific heritage and instead drawn to those Eastern religious and medical systems that teach that humans can potentially open the inner recesses of their psyches to the inflow of a higher spiritual energy (variously referred to as ch'i, prana, kundalini, or pure white light). Americans have embraced yoga, t'ai chi, ch'uan, Ayurvedic medicine, shiatsu, acupuncture, and various Oriental massage systems for their advocacy of attitudes and lifestyles geared to bringing persons into harmony with a metaphysical healing energy.

New Age crystal healing serves as an additional example of Americans' fascination with the metaphysical dimensions of alternative medicine. New Age philosophies tend to view God as a "pure white light" or "divine spirit" rather than in the traditional biblical categories of father or king. They further explain that this pure white light continuously flows into, or infuses, each plane of existence—mineral, vegetable, animal, human or mental, and astral. Pure white light is thought to enter into each person's consciousness by passing through his or her spiritual aura, where it is diffused into the seven interior centers or chakras that supply the body with power and vitality. Any technique (e.g., massage, color healing, visualization exercises, meditation) that can help persons increase their receptivity to this white light and promote its proper flow through the various chakras can thus have medical value. The most popular of these techniques is the use of rock crystals. It is claimed that crystals, because they are almost entirely devoid of color, are almost perfect capacitators of divine white light. They can be placed over a chakra believed to be "blocked," or held by a healer who moves them back and forth along the patient's nervous system. Over and beyond their healing power, crystals are thought to be capable of enhancing our spiritual awareness and aligning us more fully to the "Higher Guidance" that is believed to permeate our universe.

These examples draw attention to the fact that alternative medicine systems have become important vehicles of an unchurched American spirituality. The healing practices advocated by alternative medicine systems typically stress the importance of finding personal harmony with nature, becoming receptive to spiritual power, and establishing more emphatic relationships with one's fellow human beings. Spiritual themes such as these are especially attractive to individuals who are sensitive to the excesses of the hierarchical, exploitative, and overly male institutions that have historically dominated Western culture. Those who are attracted to alternative medicines are thus seeking to create a counterculture that provides a remedy for the increasing mechanization, secularization, and depersonalization of modern life (including modern medicine). Adherents of these groups are characteristically white, middleor upper-middleclass, well educated, and either urban or suburban (except, of course, those who subscribe to medical folk traditions owing to their participation in ethnic or immigrant communities). The ideas advocated by alternative medicine can be found in bookstores in almost every shopping mall in the country, in displays at health-food stores, and in advertisements placed in various "human potential" magazines. Thus, although only a small percentage of Americans rely on alternative healing practices to the exclusion of scientific medicine, a good many others drawn from all regions of the country and all religious denominations have been influenced by their alternative philosophies of body-mind-spirit interaction.