Page 5 - Complementary and Alternative Medicine Treatments in Psychiatry

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Preface

As with all medical disciplines, psychiatry has evolved from its
humble beginnings as an organized profession in the 1800s.
Moving from the simple concept of warehousing the mentally
unwell in asylums to seeking effective treatments in the past
century, psychiatry has experienced a number of phases as its
practitioners, like mice in a maze, seek to find shorter and surer
routes to health for their clients.
Despite that progress, mental disorders remain one of
humanities most resistant ills. We still find a familiar ring to the
words of Emil Kraepelin, the “Father of Psychiatry,” in his essay
“One Hundred Years of Psychiatry,” written nearly a century
ago: “The magnitude of the efforts to be expended on our task,
the impenetrable darkness that hides the innermost workings of
the brain...must cause even the most confident investigator to
doubt whether it is possible to make any appreciable progress
toward psychiatric knowledge and understanding.”
Each generation of physicians, however, continues to learn
from the last. Today’s psychiatrist has not only the tools of his
predecessors, but access to an unprecedented and continuous
advance in scientific research, thanks to modern global
communication networks.
Thus safe, effective alternative methods of treatment from all
corners of the earth that can complement or, in some cases,
supplant pharmaceutical and other mainstream therapeutic
tools, have gradually come to the attention of physicians and the
public alike. As research continues to unfold, such treatment
options, their efficacy demonstrated through published studies,
shed more light and hope on the “impenetrable darkness” that
the profession has confronted since psychiatry’s inception.

The Editors
January 2012