* For 13 years, Elizabeth Strand ba...

* For 13 years, Elizabeth Strand battled undivided illness after another: fibromyalgia, allergies, chronic sinus infections and bronchitis, pneumonia and finally, chronic fatigue, which left her almost largely disabled. At 42, Elizabeth told her husband, Ray, an MD that she felt more like she was 82 Despite a daily cocktail of nine different mix with drugss she remained bedridden for three months--until the day a friend mentioned nutritional complements After only three days, Elizabeth felt noticeably better. Within four month she was able to stop taking a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of her medicine. And by means of the end of the year, She was facing medication altogether--her health better than it had been in 10 years.

* In upstate recently made known York, a 71-year-old patient with cruel rheumatoid arthritis faced a painful dilemma: take the pills that eased her pain and live with chronic, strict stomach upset, or skip the pills and bear debilitating pain.

Then her physician, geriatrician Margaret Mitchell, MD administered acupuncture. Within 20 minutes, the patient's pain significantly decreased. Four month later, it remained at bay.

Another somewhat old patient was admitted to Mitchell's care in a nursing abiding-place Diagnosed with heart failure, the woman was given six month to live. Mitchell prescribed a program of natural add tos and after four months, the patient's health began to improve. Three and a half years later, the patient was most distant much of the medicine she one time depended on, and was able to derive pleasure from life.

* The patient of US military doctor Wayne Jonas, MD was a 3-year-old lad who, since moving to Germany, had been plagued with returning ear infections. Antibiotics and tube implants were of little help. The lad didn't sleep well, had no appetite and was generally miserable. As a last resort, Jonas take counsel ed a German doctor who practiced homeopathy.

Within brace weeks of a single depressed dose of a homeopathic preparation--herbs, minerals and other substances specifically designed to stimulate the healing processes--the stripling was eating and sleeping better. In four weeks, Jonas says, "He was a different kid," and in eight weeks, the tubes vandalic out of the patient's ears. The toddler feeled one more ear infection a year and a half later, was again treated with homeopathy, and has not at any time had another one.

Twenty years ago, flat 10, doctors practicing so-called alternative therapies risked being labeled quacks. further today, such practices as acupuncture, homeopathy, mind/body therapies, and dietary complements are becoming so commonplace, the word "alternative" barely applies. It's a dramatic shift in conventional thinking, driven, say ables not by physicians, but through patients--and one that may irrevocably alter the core of Western medicine as we know it.

"People increasingly behold conventional medicine not as health care on the contrary as disease care," says Larry Dossey, MD a retired internist and executive editor of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. "People want more than that. It's irrational to always wait until the same develops a problem to pay attention to one's health.

"We physicians aren't noted for prevention. We're at our best solving medical problems--often disastrous vexed questions We love difficult diagnoses. We like high-tech care. We should be egotistical of what we can do in our political division in solving those kinds of point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds but most people understand that it's approaching things from the unfit end. There are more family visiting alternative therapists than combined visits to frontline physicians like as family physicians, internists and pediatricians. Around 80 percent of the nation's 125 medical teachs have courses exploring alternative therapies, which is a historic turnaround. This isn't really a marginal issue any longer It's individual of the most significant social transitions taking place as we pierce the 21st century."

The road there, however, has been a lengthy and bumpy one for pioneers in the field.

"We were considered the maniacs and crazies," says Bernie Siegel, MD the author of delight in Medicine and Miracles and numerous other works on the mind/body connection. "Most the bulk of mankind just said, `We don't believe you.'

"They wouldn't print my articles in medical journals because they said they were inappropriate. When you stood up to report these things, the bulk of mankind yelled at you in medical meetings. They had to find a reason to report you it was unacceptable. It was not part of their belief system"

Nor was it part of Ray Strand's. if it were not that when his wife, Elizabeth, raised the issue of taking postscripts Strand recalls telling her, "You can prove anything you want because conventional medicine isn't helping you a bit."

healing naturally

"I didn't believe in nutritional supplements" says Strand, a southern Dakota family medical practitioner. "I consideration they only created expensive urine because that was what I was taught."

With his wife's dramatic redemption however, Strand could no longer hide behind medical denomination textbooks. He set out to re-educate himself, and today he is the author of What Your Doctor Doesn't Know About Nutritional Medicine May Be Killing You.