Here’s a term that is often misused or misunderstood, because it is used pejoratively, to insinuate something other than what it actually means:
Allopathic Medicine.
People mistakenly put this label on conventional medicine as though it is a system that does not treat illness. But the actual *meaning* of allopathy is “a system of medical practice that aims to combat disease by use of remedies producing effects different from or incompatible with those produced by the disease being treated.”In other words, the aim is to cure disease, fix the issue, alleviate suffering. So, if you are choosing something other than allopathy, you are essentially allowing the same effects of the disease to prevail. It is that simple. Allopathy = medicine. People might use other names to mean essentially the same thing, from biomedicine to conventional medicine to Western medicine, but at the end of the day all those terms have one thing in common: medicine. The second definition of allopathy is this: “a system of medical practice making use of all measures that have proved of value in treatment of disease.” Note the key phrase: proved of value in treatment.
Anything that has been proven to be of value, anything that produces an effect incompatible with the disease, is allopathic in nature.
Anyone saying that allopathic medicine has failed, try this magical version instead, is lying to you. This is a technique used by charlatans, to create fear and distrust and paranoia. It is rampant on the Interwebs and I see it Every. Single. Day. Maybe I’m sensitive to it, but it drives me nuts.
A bit of history: the term, allopathy, was created by Samuel Hahnemann around 1810, while he was promoting his new vision of homeopathy.
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