Western Medicine Advantages And Disadvantages

Allopathic medicine, otherwise known as western medicine, is defined as, “A system in which medical doctors and other healthcare professionals (such as nurses, pharmacists, and therapists) treat symptoms and diseases using drugs, radiation, or surgery” (National Cancer Society). On the other hand, a different approach to the treatment of ailments and diseases is Holistic medicine. According to The American Holistic Health Association (AHHA), “Holistic Medicine is the art and science of healing that addresses the whole person - body, mind, and spirit” (AHHA). All these definitions are great and treating things like diseases and broken bones is a good thing but what is really being said or done when a patient chooses one over the other? Also,

Another factor that must be taken into consideration is that holistic medicine arose long before western medicine and has been used for centuries. Allopathic medicine is new in the perspective of mankind while holistic medicine has almost all of mankind’s history worth of experience. The latter type of medicine doesn’t focus on just treating the ailment at hand, but it also tries to improve the overall well-being of the body, spirit, mind, and even their social health. Advantages of choosing this way of treatment is whole- person treatment, exclusive attention, rare side-effects, and stress on prevention. In contrast, traditional medicine deals only with what is wrong at the moment, and if applicable, the disease or illness that is causing these symptoms, not all the aspects of life and the medicine prescribed almost always has annoying side effects. Doctors who practice western medicine examine hundreds of patients a week, therefore there is no special attention given. Not only that, but it does not try to prevent illnesses or diseases, whether mental or physical, except in obvious cases such as an allergy or asthma attack for example. It is not all imperfect, though. Advantages of western medicine include, but are not limited to, evidence based treatments, constant room for scientific

According to The World Bank’s Development Education Program, countries with better hospitals, ultimately, showed a greater life expectancy for its citizens and an improved survival rate for diseases and premature births. There are three main kinds of hospitals in the U.S., namely general hospitals, specialty hospitals, and government hospitals; however, for the sakre of relevance we will only look at the first two. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines general hospital as, “a hospital in which patients with many different types of ailments are given care” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). In other words, a general hospital can provide all the services that relate to the body, whether mental or physical. On the other hand, a specialty hospital is defined by The American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons as, “Specialty hospitals offer focused services to treat medical conditions that require a particular subset of skills and technology” (AAOS). These two kinds of hospitals are similar in that they both treat a wide variety of things but in different extents. A general hospital treats a wide variety of basically everything, from the common cold to a hernia. On the contrary, specialty hospitals treat a wide variety of a specific disease, age group, or other ways of patients with a similarity of some sort. An example of a specialty hospital is St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital which specializes in children and