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This chapter reviews alternative therapies for autism. These include diet therapy, vitamins, ketogenic diet, use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, combinations of homeopathic growth, detoxification of mercury, auditory integration therapy, music therapy, Doman-Delacato technique, craniosacral therapy, holding therapy, horse and pony riding therapy, and dance/music therapy.

This chapter examines Spiritualist writings about health and the body. For a movement that was otherworldly in its focus, Spiritualists were extremely interested in medicine and many, including Andrew Jackson Davis, worked as healers and country doctors. In an epoch when bloodletting and heroic measures were still common, a spiritual or philosophical explanation for ill health was often preferable to mainstream authority. Spiritualists embraced the idea of the Grand Man from Swedenborg, where the microcosm of the human body reflected the macrocosm of the universe as a whole. Resembling the Kabbalah’s articulation of Adam Kadmon and tracing its roots to Plato’s Timaeus, this construction of the body as the cosmos in miniature did not distinguish between the material and spiritual worlds but rather saw them as united parts of the divine.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's religious conversion of 1843 was paralleled in 1846 by a secular conversion to the water cure. Both were informed by the millennial hope of a perfect world, and both placed a baptism and a crisis at the heart of the cure. “Wash and Be Healed,” proclaimed the banner of the Water-Cure Journal, unabashedly appealing to millennial hopes. Hydropathy promised to do for the body what religious conversion had done for the soul. Appealing to the reformist striving of the age, hydropathy's goals were framed in specific, this worldly terms, that siphoned off religious energies into secular channels; in this respect the water cure was a harbinger of late-Victorian culture. Hydropathy taught that hygienic living was the best prevention of illness, and that through self-care one could enjoy good health and freedom from drugs and doctors. Hydropathy had strong links with homeopathy, which advocated the use of miniscule doses of medicine.

The nature and complexities of complementary therapies and their underpinning philosophical approaches present a challenge to the research community. Some complementary therapies have the potential to provide supportive (such as quality of life) benefits and symptom relief in patients with cancer. Evidence for their effectiveness from randomised controlled trials is limited due to the lack of trials of high methodological quality. Nonetheless, in an increasingly evidence-based treatment culture, healthcare professionals and people with cancer will need to have access to the best-available evidence on the effectiveness of complementary therapies. This chapter presents a summary of the current research findings, considers the methodological challenges and safety issues, and provides resources for further details. Complementary therapies, such as acupuncture, homeopathy, massage, aromatherapy, and yoga, have the potential to provide some relief for the symptoms of cancer and the side effects of treatments. These symptoms range from breathlessness to hot flushes, dry mouth problems due to chemotherapy, nausea and vomiting induced by chemotherapy, and pain. Plant-based treatments for cancer are also discussed.

The homeopathic approach is underpinned by the philosophy that each person is unique and may benefit from an individualised prescription. Remedies can be derived from animal, mineral, or plant sources. Consultation style is patient led, symptom or problem orientated, and benefits from sensitive listening skills and an innate curiosity on the part of the prescriber to discover the nature of the problem. This process can resemble a palliative care approach — collecting information on patient concerns and symptoms and taking into consideration the social, spiritual, and psychological aspects that contribute to the human response to suffering. The evidence base for homeopathy in the cancer setting is still in its infancy but a systematic review suggests that cancer patients have benefited from homeopathic interventions, specifically for chemotherapy-induced stomatitis, radiodermatitis, and symptoms of oestrogen withdrawal in breast cancer survivors. This chapter describes the preparation of homeopathic medicines, laboratory and clinical research on homeopathy, problems encountered using the homeopathic approach, and homeopathy as part of the National Health Service of the United Kingdom.

This chapter argues that the texts of Gregory of Nazianzus’s ascetic poetry can be read as active transformers of the audience rather than as “bodies” transformed by interpretation. An examination of poemata 2.1.34, 45, and 39 reveals that poetic structures demonstrate the resolution of paradox, thereby recognizing and reconciling the paradox of human mixis––unifying the corporeal instrument and leading men by example toward a wholly spiritual life. The text offers readers patterns like chiasm, leading them to experience poetry both physically and spiritually like ascetics living the metaphor of paradise. Thus, the active poetic text, words captured in measured time just like men, performs a purificatory rite and offers a homeopathic cure for the paradox of human multiplicity.

This chapter examines several commonly used complementary therapies in the management of respiratory diseases, including asthma, chronic obstructive airways disease, and advanced cancer-related breathlessness. These complementary therapies include acupuncture, herbalism, and homeopathy. Evidence from randomised controlled trials reveals that acupuncture, homoeopathy, and yoga are promising therapies. The chapter suggests that complementary therapies should be rigorously tested so that patients can be better informed about which treatments will benefit them most and that more research is needed to determine the benefit of risk profiling each therapy.

Naturopathic medicine (a.k.a., naturopathy) is marketed as a unique form of primary care medicine that is allegedly patient-centered, safe, and effective. The heart of naturopathy is positioned within a philosophy that presumes “natural” and “traditional” methods are better than the science-driven practices of modern medicine. Naturopaths have become skilled at selling this “nature works best” gimmick through scientific deception, hyperbole, and pseudo-profundity. The result is the rise of a new medical profession lacking standards of care and a basis in reality, which teaches its practitioners to provide treatments that are inherently unethical or even illegal. How do I know? I was a licensed naturopath who sold this naturopathic quackery to patients. Herein lies stories from my time as one of these fake doctors.

This chapter identifies the differences that separate homeopathy from biomedicine. The tension between homeopathy and conventional medicine is essentially that of two epistemologically different systems; one whose view of disease causation begins at the metaphysical level, and the other whose view begins at the cellular level. Conventional medicine believes that the causation of disease begins at the cellular level, and follows a complex course whose outcomes must be carefully analyzed to separate out bias and chance. In contrast, homeopathy views disease causation as highly individualized, meaning different things in different settings. In many ways, homeopathy is the poster child of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in that it faces the dilemma of justifying itself as a faith-based system, a form of psychotherapy or chaplaincy, a paranormal system that will eventually be explained to the satisfaction of reductionist science, or simply the equivalent of the placebo effect.

This chapter describes the allopathic response to the democratic challenges of alternative medical sects, particularly homeopathy. It describes the formation of the American Medical Association (AMA) and its early practices as an organizational response to the problem of adjudication. The organization has three goals: educating the public on medical issues, reforming allopathic medical education, and combating “quackery” in all its guises through legislative efforts.

Anthroposophy’s diverse environmental initiatives all sprouted from the “seed” of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual teaching, given in books and lectures during the first decades of the twentieth century. Steiner was a complex teacher: a modern interpreter of Western esoteric traditions, an evolutionary thinker who proposed a spiritual alternative to Darwinian materialism, and an idealistic social reformer. Steiner’s Agriculture Course of 1924, which initiated biodynamic agriculture, expressed the holistic worldview characteristic of all environmental impulses, insisting that “in great Nature, everything is connected.” But Steiner’s holism extended beyond planet Earth to encompass the whole cosmos, including spiritual powers he claimed to access through alchemical and homeopathic practices.

Anthroposophy, with its alchemical emphasis on the balancing of polarities, brings several gifts to the ongoing evolution of the environmental movement. These gifts include a cosmic holism that challenges us to attend to ever-widening circles of interconnection; a homeopathic model of social change that invites us to use subtle influences to heal the world; an appropriate anthropocentrism that allows us to experience ourselves as fully at home in the world; and a vision of planetary transmutation that can resist climate change while embracing biological and spiritual evolution.

In this chapter, the author reflects on homeopathy and Juliano Mer Khamis's Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. He cites the dialogue between Tali Fahima, a Mizrahi Israeli Jew, and Zakaria Zbeidi, who now runs the Freedom Theatre. Fahima served as a human shield to Zbeidi and was imprisoned in Israel under solitary confinement for allegedly “aiding and abetting an enemy.” Zbeidi was for a time the number one name on Israel's list of “wanted terrorists.” The author also discusses the opening of the Remembering Lebanon exhibition in Jenin, his time at Café Bialik in Tel Aviv, his meeting with Fahima at Café Yafe, and his encounter with a Russian Jewish immigrant and homeopathic physician.

This chapter examines Calcutta homeopaths, emphasizing their self-proclaimed ability to target patients' “nerves.” The influential position of homeopathy in Bengal helps us to understand lay suspicions of biomedical drugs as expensive, full of toxic side effects, and capable only of superficial “suppression” of illness symptoms. Invented by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843), homeopathy has been practiced in India since the early nineteenth century. Under Indira Gandhi, in 1973 the Indian Parliament recognized homeopathy as one of seven “national systems of medicine.” Today homeopathy is supervised alongside other forms of Indian medicine in a department of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare called AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Homoeopathy).

This chapter examines the impact of democracy and its attendant economic, political, and cultural changes on American medicine during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It explains how the egalitarian rhetoric of political and cultural life of the Jacksonian era gave new impetus to the idea that every man was master of his own fate, including that of his health—a democratic ethos that further undermined the importance of physicians in medical care. It also considers the new fads in medicine that challenged the established medical community, particularly homeopathy, Thomsonianism, hydropathy, eclecticism, the Graham fitness program, and patented medicines. Finally, it explores the rise of medical nationalism that not only undermined the possibility of a scientific approach to medicine but also reinforced the dependence on heroic therapies.

After discussing William James’s medical freedom advocacy, this chapter describes orthodox medicine and the main alternative medical sects during the Gilded Age. The chapter then explores the resurgence of medical licensing during this period and shows how the continuing popular preference for freedom of therapeutic choice was reflected in the medical licensing statutes as written and implemented. It considers the meaning and impact of Dent v. West Virginia, the 1889 Supreme Court case upholding medical licensing. It then explores the content of the arguments directed against discriminatory medical licensing in the Gilded Age and considers the persistence of all four strains of medical freedom rhetoric from the antebellum years (bodily freedom, economic freedom, freedom of belief, and freedom of inquiry). It concludes by examining the overall political philosophy of medical freedom activists during this period, in particular the extent and nature of their libertarianism.

This chapter introduces the notion of medical dissidence: conscious deviation from the main current of professional opinion. Cosmopolitanism is applied as a way of getting to grips with the popularity of Alternative Medicine despite its common dismissal among the literati. Most efficacy claims are not well supported in Alternative Medicine. However, it is not necessarily irrational to give them credence, or to rely on anecdotal evidence, because testimony is so central to nearly all medical evidence, and people are very differently placed in the reasons they might have to believe or disbelieve testimony. In addition, there may be non-curative value in alternative medicine. Cosmopolitanism does not advise an attitude of “anything goes,” but does urge humility on those of whatever persuasion who dismiss other traditions or people as irrational.

The Great Fire of Pittsburgh devastated the city, in the process consuming the old wooden Smithfield Street Bridge, leaving only the piers in the river. With John already at work on a similar structure across the river, and with the city desperate to rebuild, John received the contract to rebuild the Monongahela crossing almost immediately. His Allegheny Aqueduct was opened afterward to universal acclaim, after which he retreated to Saxonburg to recuperate and plunged wholeheartedly into his next big obsession: the water cure. Despite devoting much of his life to science, John was always distrustful of doctors and traditional medicine, and he relied increasingly on his own theories and practices, many of which we would now call deluded at best. Thankfully, John soon returned to what he was undoubtedly good at and set about rebuilding the Monongahela Bridge. Again, the effort was immense and the results spectacular. The bridge was finished and opened the following spring, by which time John was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost suspension bridge engineers in the world.