Why Is It So Hard To Find Open-Minded Clinicians Who Understand Complementary Therapies?

Even the most open-minded clinicians are not well-versed on all available alternatives but it's not their fault. Here's why.

Depth, Not Breadth

The paradigm of allopathic medicine primarily operates on understanding all the physical aspects of the body in various systems (like the nervous system, the endocrine symptom, the cardiovascular system, etc.) Once learning these, some clinicians choose to be generalists, like your primary care doctors. For these busy practices, there is a broad amount of information to know and it takes so much of their time and energy to continue to gain and maintain knowledge, within the boundaries of their training.

Other than certain generalists, many clinicians focus in a particular specialty. Here too, there is just so much to learn, so much to practice, and so much to know within each specialty. And, to add to this, there are even sub-specialties that many clinicians focus on. For example, there are neurologists who focus their practice solely on Multiple Sclerosis. Think about that for a moment: there is so much complexity and so much need for just this one disease area that it warrants some clinicians to focus just on this.

This focus is important. It is critical to have expertise and depth to ensure appropriate diagnoses are made and appropriate therapeutic options are offered.

This Great Strength Is Also A Weakness

Because of the curriculum of allopathic training, most clinicians are not exposed to other information that is outside of this. We are trained to focus solely on evidence-based treatments that have relied on double-blind, placebo-controlled studies with a large enough number of people to gather credible insight and knowledge into safe and effective treatments. Anything that does not fall into that category are systematically rejected based on the scientific method.

Most allopaths just don't know what they don't know.

They simply have not had the hands-on exposure or experience with all types of complementary options. And, even if they have (such as knowing their patients are receiving Reiki treatments in Oncology), their training prevents them from having a place to integrate this information into their understanding. Remember, their training dictates that anything that is not appropriately evaluated in very large, well-controlled studies is meaningless.

So, it is not the clinician's fault. Complementary and alternative modalities are just not their specialty. Very simply, they are just not the experts in this area. And that's OK.

If Your Physician Is Not The Expert, Where Can You Get Trustworthy Information On Complementary Modalities?

The Wellness Journey Club is here to help you navigate through your questions about complementary and alternative options. We have created a new wellness model integrating the best parts of many modalities. Our goal is to make alternative options and complementary options accessible to everyone in an educated, fun way.

Ask us your questions today!

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