The NCCAM, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is one of the 27 institutes of the National Institutes of Health. It was created to support development of the scientific evidence needed to either prove that the various alternative or complementary approaches to medicine (CAM) are helpful to patients, or that they are not.
While the bulk of this website is aimed at the researchers who study CAM, there is a good deal of information for patients, too. Here are the categories of CAM medicine discussed on the NCCAM website:
- Biologically-Based, such as herbal remedies, botanicals, animal-derived products, vitamins, proteins, probiotics and other organic approaches.
- Energy Medicine, such as veritable energies like sound, electromagnetic forces, and light or putative energy fields (also called biofields) which works to identify a body's own energy field.
- Manipulative and Body-Based, such as chiropractic, osteopathic and therapeutic massage.
- Mind-Body Medicine, which focuses on the interactions among the brain, behavior and physical health, such as meditation, yoga, biofeedback, even spirituality.
- Whole Medical Systems that have evolved totally separately from what we consider to be conventional medicine in the United States. These systems have names like naturopathy, homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, Eastern medicine and ayurvedic medicine.
In addition, patients will find excellent advice about how to discern which CAM therapies can truly be useful to them vs. those which are bogus claims.
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