Complementary Therapies for the Contemporary Healthcare

Edited by Marcelo Saad and Roberta de Medeiros, ISBN 978-953-51-0801-6, 244 pages, Publisher: InTech, Chapters published October 17, 2012 under CC BY 3.0 license

DOI: 10.5772/3307

Complementary therapies (CTs) are practices, products or systems for health that are outside the domain of conventional medicine (also called Western or allopathic medicine), used either to treat illnesses or to promote health and well-being. Defining CTs is difficult, because the field is very broad and constantly changing. The list of what is considered CT changes continually, and therapies whose safety and effectiveness are demonstrated may become part of conventional medicine. We hope the information from the present book can collaborate in some manner with the ongoing process of evolution of the paradigms related to concepts of health, disease and healing.

Chapter 1 Complementary Therapies – Considerations Before Recommend, Tolerate or Proscribe Themby Roberta de Medeiros and Marcelo Saad

Chapter 2 Integrating Complementary and Conventional Care Using Quality Use of Medicines as a Frameworkby Trisha Dunning

Chapter 3 Evaluating Homeopathic Therapies for Contemporary Health Care: An Evident Priorityby Vilelmine Carayanni

Chapter 4 Review of Traditional Chinese Medicine Pulse Diagnosis Quantificationby Anson Chui Yan Tang

Chapter 5 Does the Cognitive Top-Down Systems Biology Approach, Embodied in Virtual Scanning, Provide Us with a Theoretical Framework to Explain the Function of Most Complementary and Alternative and Most Orthodox Biomedical Techniques?by Graham Wilfred Ewing

Chapter 6 Musical Auditory Stimulation and Cardiac Autonomic Regulationby Vitor Engrácia Valenti, Luiz Carlos de Abreu, Heraldo L. Guida, Luiz Carlos M. Vanderlei, Lucas Lima Ferreira and Celso Ferreira

Chapter 7 Spiritual-Religious Coping – Health Services Empowering Patients’ Resourcesby Marcelo Saad and Roberta de Medeiros

Chapter 8 Botanical Species as Traditional Therapy: A Quantitative Analisys of the Knowledge Among Ranchers in Southeastern Brazilby Maria Franco Trindade Medeiros, Luci de Senna-Valle and Regina Helena Potsch Andreata

Chapter 9 Hypocholesterolaemic Effects of Probioticsby Kalavathy Ramasamy, Zuhailah Mohd Shafawi, Vasudevan Mani, Ho Yin Wan and Abu Bakar Abdul Majeed

Chapter 10 Traditional and Modern Medicine Harmonizing the Two Approaches in the Treatment of Neurodegeneration (Alzheimer’s Disease – AD)by Bowirrat Abdalla, Mustafa Yassin, Menachem Abir, Bishara Bisharat and Zaher Armaly

Chapter 11 Distant Healing by the Supposed Vital Energy – Scientific Basesby Marcelo Saad and Roberta de Medeiros