The world is sick. Don’t get me wrong. By this, I mean that no matter how hard the world tries to heal itself of so many illnesses that physically attack humans, there is no one way that is effective enough to combat all the problems of health. In fact, new sicknesses seem to come out of nowhere and surprise us with its strong effects on human mortality every year. Two of the most prominent ways to heal the human body are Western Medicine and Oriental Medicine. Western Medicine believes in scientific research based solutions to the illnesses that we have today.
It comprises not only of drugs in the form of tablets, pills and syrup, but also of surgical procedures and therapies. To make it clearer, Western Medicine is primarily used in hospitals and clinics. Oriental Medicine on the other hand deals with herbal and animal concoctions, acupressure and acupuncture to aid the healing of certain sicknesses. The Chinese are proponents of this type of curing for they have been using it for thousand of years prior to the formality of Western Medicine.
However, these are considered by Western Medicine as alternative methods and due to the lack of immediate formal scientific study, it had taken a back seat in the world of healing. Theory Simon Poore (2000) says that according to renowned sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, individuals bring order to, or make sense of their social world through a psychological process, which he calls “the documentary method”. This entails that the individual interprets new facts by assessing the pattern that has been established relating to this.
For example, when a certain illness is discovered to be cured by simple massaging, an individual will accept it as a fact that whenever the symptoms of this illness appear, massage will heal it. This seems to be a logical explanation on how cures have come to be. History of Western Medicine Western Medicine is practiced by holders of Medical Doctor or Doctor of Osteopathy degrees and their allied health professionals such as physical therapists, psychologists, and registered nurses.
(Medicine Net Inc. , 2007) Mainstream medicine, another term for Western medicine, is mostly practiced in the Western hemisphere like the United States and Europe. This approaches a problem scientifically. It’s based on the philosophical foundations of Western thinking, which maintains that a body is only a collection of its parts, and that by isolating the parts and studying them separately, you can understand the whole. (Adams 2006) In the primeval days, magic was mixed with the herbs.
The “doctors” then would call on the spirits from stones, rocks, trees, and other inanimate objects to help cure the sick or dying man or woman. Other “doctors” would call on the spirits or gods or even ask the help of long dead ancestors and dead tribe leaders to aid in the cure of the patients. Furthermore, some “doctors” would use so called mystical powers and other magical means of getting to the truth of the disease. Western medicine encompasses herbalism, animism, shamanism, spiritualism and divination (Clarke. 1997).
Western medicine (Freeman, 2001) slowly increased in many places like India, Egypt, Greece, China, and other human civilizations. Modern western medicine today had its roots in the later part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century in ageless England with the studies done by William Harvey during the seventeenth century. Also, Rudolf Virchow made western medical researches in Germany while France had its own medical scientists in the name of Jean Martin Charcot, Claude Bernard and others.