The Healing Effect: Complementary Medicine’s Unifying Principle

Complementary medicine is now used increasingly by lay people and, to a lesser extent, by doctors. Although conventional medicine saves life in a crisis and keeps many of its clients active1, there is a growing public unease about many of its techniques. Many people are turning towards the often simpler therapies offered by complementary practitioners, particularly for chronic, non-life threatening conditions.
In spite of this trend, complementary therapies are largely ignored by mainstream science and medicine because of the apparent lack of any common principle or theoretical basis by which their effects might be explained2.
To some extent, this is the fault of medicine which remains tied to the Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic model of the world, despite new revel-ations in physics which suggest that Newtonian mechanics are only a partial view of reality. Complementary medicine, on the other hand, is grounded in the newly evolving scientific/medical paradigm which is based on subtle or spiritual energies.