Alternative Health Products Vs Modern Medicine

If you had to pick an issue that has been carving out its own corner of the debate market among the medical community in recent years you would have to, at some point or another, address the issue of the renewed interest in alternative health products and the way that interest is changing the face of modern medicine.
Did you know that most M.D.s know very little about the potential benefits of alternative health products when it comes to treating various diseases and disorders that modern medicine has been trying to cure for years?
In fact, the only doctors that regularly prescribe alternative treatment methods for their patients are pediatricians, not because they believe in the value of alternative health products so much as most medicines aren't considered to be safe for children less than a year old.
Shouldn't that tell us something?
Alternative health products are made from the same natural products as the foods we eat. In fact, many of the most popular "superfoods" cutting their way through the commercial market today, such as acai berry and cayenne pepper, have been a regular part of the diet of various civilizations around the world for centuries.
Because they are a natural food source they do not have many of the same dangers and side effects as modern day pharmaceuticals, and although some alternative health products have wreaked havoc in the past it has usually been in individual cases where the person had an allergy, metabolic problem, drug interaction or other isolated unnatural occurrence rather than a dysfunction on a large scale.
People have been using alternative health products to treat their ailments for years, although many of them may not have been aware that was what they were doing. Every time they reached for the aloe vera to soothe a sunburn, a vitamin C drop to stave off a cold or a can of ginger ale to settle their stomach they were using the same alternative health treatments that their ancestors used years ago.
That doesn't mean that we should scrap modern medicine completely and revert back to a homeopathic society, however. Despite intense amounts of research being done in labs around the world, an alternative treatment for cancer other than radiation or chemo has yet to show noteworthy success (although they are working on it).
Antibiotics are a much more efficient method of dealing with a bacterial infection before it becomes septic, and alternative anesthesias...well, try not to think too hard about that one.
The bottom line is that modern medicine and alternative health products need to work side by side in today's medical world, not constantly be fighting for the upper hand.