Medical Information
Ayurveda was originally a Hindu medical system which had its beginning more than 2,500 years ago in the sixth century B.C. It was adapted by Buddhists and other religious groups and has recently undergone a rebirth in India and throughout the Western world where it is considered a viable alternative to pharamaceutically based western medicine.

Ayurveda is a humoral medical model. The humors are defined as air, bile, phelgm, and blood. Ayurveda postulates that most humans are born in humoral balance but soon loose this balance due to unbalanced diet, unbalanced emotional experiences, or traveling away from the physical location on the earth which is most in harmony with his or her constitution.

The primary means of returning to humoral balance is diet. While Ayurveda has general recommendations for diet which anyone can follow for optimal health, more serious illnesses are treated by a qualified Ayurvedic physician. This type of physician is required to take at least seven years of training in Ayurvedic medicine and will recommend a finely tuned diet and other methods to return humoral balance.

Medical Tips & Questions
Homeopathy is probably the most difficult of the mainstream alternative methods of healing for conventional doctors to understand. It was derived empirically by Samuel Hahnemann who discovered that a substance, which causes the symptoms of an illness, when given in a small dose acts as a trigger to intensify the healing processes that the body's immune system has already begun.

Doctors are not scientists. They like to imagine they are scientists, but really they are clinicians. The real mode of action of most medicines prescribed by conventional doctors are not fully understood by those doctors. Nevertheless, doctors have their explanations and they dream that this makes them scientists. The problem conventional medicine has with homeopathy (aside from the fact that it is competition) is that no explanation so far has been satisfying. Homeopaths themselves are less concerned with explanation and more concerned with results.

Homeopaths share with doctors who practice nutritional medicine the point of view that merely suppressing symptoms with drugs in no way goes to the heart of a health problem and that until one deals with the actual imbalance which produced the symptom in the first place, the disease process will continue to press for expression. Health problems may seem to disappear after drug administration, but the imbalance may appear in a new form.