Popularly known practitioners of Complementary Alternative Medicine

DEFINITION: Popularly known practitioners of complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine.

Overview

Numerous health professionals have chosen to include the principles and therapies of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in their healthcare practices. Some do so while maintaining their traditional medical practices. Certain practitioners have become well-known in the field of CAM. The following sections highlight the key CAM practitioners: Samuel Hahnemann, Edward Bach, John Harvey Kellogg, Andrew Weil, and Deepak Chopra.

Key Practitioners

Samuel Hahnemann. Samuel Hahnemann, born April 10, 1755, in East Germany, is best known for his work in homeopathy—a medical system he defined. Homeopathy considers physical symptoms to be guides to the underlying causes of illness and disease.

Hahnemann was a brilliant student who excelled in science and languages, including German, French, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, English, and Latin. He became a medical student in 1975 and graduated four years later with his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Erlangen in Bavaria. As a practicing physician, Hahnemann became disenchanted with traditional medicine and became a reformer. He advocated the importance of fresh air, regular exercise, a healthy diet, and restful sleep for patients as well as maintaining public hygiene, adequate housing, and proper sewage disposal. He was a writer, intuitively recognizing the role of microorganisms and genetics in disease before other scientists documented these concepts. Hahnemann opposed the abuse of persons with mental illness and employed compassion when working with psychiatric patients.

As the founder of homeopathy, he established a system of holistic treatments that supported the importance of the mind/body connection. His treatments used the law of similars, or “like cures like” (similia similibus curentur). He developed a sophisticated laboratory process, a shaking process, to develop medicines that became stronger through dilutions and succession. These homeopathic medicines encouraged the body to respond and heal itself. This approach was unlike traditional Western medicine, which relied on the management and suppression of symptoms rather than on effecting a cure. To prove his ideas, Hahnemann tested his solutions on himself with repeated success.

Hahnemann served as the chosen physician to the wealthy and famous while providing free care to the poor. Homeopathy demonstrated positive clinical results across Europe, India, and Russia, where it was preferred to other treatments of the day, such as purging and bloodletting.

Edward Bach. Edward Bach was born in 1886 in the United Kingdom. Early in his successful career, Bach practiced as a traditional physician with conventional approaches. He found that an individual’s personality and attitude affected their health and thought that this should be considered as a part of medical treatment. Like Samuel Hahnemann, he believed that the focus of treating illness should be not on symptom suppression but on addressing the disease's root cause. His dissatisfaction with traditional medicine led him to pursue advanced education in immunology as a bacteriologist.

In 1917, Bach was diagnosed with a severe illness and was told he had three months to live. He focused on his work and lived years past those expected three months. Bach believed that his extended life was helped by following his passion and avocation and that this was a key to spiritual and physical health.

While working at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital from 1919 to 1922, Bach discovered that Hahnemann had connected the personality to disease more than one hundred years earlier. Bach sought a holistic approach to his medical practice. He used his skills and knowledge from traditional medicine to develop oral vaccines, which he called the Seven Bach Nosodes, from intestinal bacteria and used them to successfully treat chronic diseases and promote health. The medical profession embraced the concept of vaccines from bacteria, but Bach wanted to develop plant-based therapies. He developed flower essences from Impatiens and Clematis, among other flowering plants. He eventually produced close to forty essences that addressed negative states of mind, and he formulated what he called a Rescue Remedy for stress and other conditions.

Bach provided treatment free of charge to the poor until he died at the age of fifty years, some twenty years after he was told he had three months to live. The Dr. Edward Bach Centre in England offers education and practitioner referrals.

John Harvey Kellogg. John Harvey Kellogg, born in Michigan on February 26, 1852, was one of the first physicians to advocate the importance of nutrition in the management of disease. Kellogg graduated in 1875 with a medical degree from New York University Medical College, Bellevue Hospital.

Kellogg’s recognition as a medical physician was connected to his work at Battle Creek Sanitarium, a facility originally operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church as Western Health Reform Institute. Here, the wealthy and famous would stay and seek ways to improve their health. Among those who came for therapy at the sanitarium were US President William Howard Taft, businessmen John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford, aviator Amelia Earhart, playwright George Bernard Shaw, and inventor Thomas Edison. Activities provided at the sanitarium included education and lectures on healthy lifestyles. Approaches included healthy nutrition through simple vegetarian diets with nuts, prescribed exercise, breathing exercises with fresh air, and abstinence from smoking and drinking alcohol. Residents of Battle Creek Sanitarium could receive enemas, hydrotherapy, phototherapy through sunbaths, and other treatments.

Kellogg taught that a meatless diet was preferred for health. He produced the first meatless “meat” made from nuts and was one of the first to advocate the use of soy-based products. Understanding that the body had natural disease defenses through friendly bacteria in the intestine, he supported the use of acidophilus milk, which included the helpful bacterium Lactobacillus acidophilus. Kellogg and his brother were instrumental in developing a healthy breakfast cereal that later became Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which remained popular.

Kellogg died on December 14, 1943, at the age of ninety-one, famous for his energy and vision. He authored more than fifty books and was a generous philanthropist.

Andrew Weil. Andrew Weil, one of the most popular CAM practitioners, was born on June 8, 1942, in Philadelphia. He is best known for fusing conventional and alternative medicines into what he called integrative medicine, emphasizing preferred natural ways to health while supporting traditional medical approaches in a health crisis. He recommended boosting the body’s natural immune system through activities such as healthy diet, regular exercise, and stress management.

From his early years, Weil had demonstrated diverse abilities and talents. His academic achievements led him to Harvard University, where he majored in biology. His academic mentor, Richard Schultes, an ethnobotanist, influenced his life path. In 1964, Weil graduated from Harvard with a degree in biology and a concentration in botany. Four years later, he graduated from medical school.

As a staff member of the Harvard Botanical Museum, Weil secured independent funding to study medicinal plants and traditional health practices of peoples in the Americas and Africa. He wrote the first of his many books, The Natural Mind (1972), during this time. His research led him to examine the differences between conventional medicine and alternative practices, such as the use of organic compounds rather than synthetic drugs.

In 1983, Weil accepted a position as a clinical professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine while maintaining his private practice. He founded the Program for Integrative Medicine at Arizona, where health professionals can train in the practices of integrative medicine.

Weil bridged the gap between traditional medicine and CAM. He was featured on the October 17, 2005, cover of Time magazine. Weil’s ideas have influenced the establishment of integrative medicine programs at various colleges and healthcare agencies across the United States.

Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra, born on October 22, 1947, in New Delhi, India, is an advocate of mind/body healing and emotional wellness. His father, a cardiologist, encouraged him to enter medicine by appealing to the young Chopra’s love of reading.

Chopra completed medical school at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and did his internship at New Jersey’s Muhlenberg Hospital. He served as chief of staff at Boston Regional Medical Center. He is a successful board-certified internal medicine physician and endocrinologist. He has written more than fifty-five books, fourteen of which have been best sellers. Chopra also is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post.

Time magazine lauded Chopra’s diverse career in CAM, including his work with Ayurveda, Transcendental Meditation, Eastern spirituality, and New Age philosophy. In 1996, with David Simon, he opened the Chopra Center for Well-being in La Jolla, California. This center provides retreats, education, and training programs that merge the best of modern Western medicine with the Eastern principles of healing. The center’s signature program, Perfect Health, offers retreats in which guests may participate in Panchakarma detoxification and in cleansing, yoga, and meditation.

Many other practitioners have contributed to the development and evolution of complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine. Andrew Still founded osteopathic medicine and established the American School of Osteopathy at the end of the nineteenth century. William Bates developed the Bates method for improved vision throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modern leaders include Mark Hyman, who founded the UltraWellness Center. Hyman is a medical doctor who advocates for functional medicine, wellness, and healthy living for his patients. World-renowned naturopath Dr. Lise Alschuler advocates integrative medicine in oncology and cancer prevention.

Bibliography

Bradford, Thomas Lindsley. The Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann. Boericke & Tafel, 1895.

"Complementary and Alternative Medicine: History." Duquesne University, 22 Feb. 2024, guides.library.duq.edu/complementary‗medicine/history. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

Kellogg, John Harvey. The Battle Creek Sanitarium System: History, Organization, Methods, Battle Creek, Michigan. 1908. Forgotten Books, 2018.

Leary, B. “The Early Work of Dr. Edward Bach.” British Homeopathic Journal, vol. 88, no. 1, 1999, pp. 28-30.

Ng, Jeremy Y., et al. “The Brief History of Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine Terminology and the Development and Creation of an Operational Definition.” Integrative Medicine Research, vol. 12, no. 4, 2023. doi.org/10.1016/j.imr.2023.100978. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.

Weil, Andrew. “On Integrative Medicine and the Nature of Reality.” Interview by Bonnie Horrigan. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, vol. 7, no. 4, 2001, pp. 96-104.