Alternative medicine refers to a form of treatment, which is very different from allopathic or the generally accepted medicine practice. There are various forms of alternative medicine. They go by the names of faith healing, magneto therapy, natural therapy, aroma therapy, reiki, gem therapy, ayurveda, herbal therapy and homeopathy.

Now, more and more people are turning towards alternative medicine by moving away from allopathic. This has often resulted in the medicine community taking up the issue against practitioners of alternative medicine. In many countries the forms of alternative medicine are not approved or recognized. Practitioners of alternative medicine cannot practice it on the general public. However, in private, they can practice alternative medicine.

However, there are instances of alternative medicine found to be useful to treat psychological and emotional problems. Nowadays, alternative medicine is suggested for people with various tendencies since it involves a lot of counseling.

Alternative medicine is also employed as a complementary exercise to cure people suffering from various forms of cancer. It has been proven that alternative medicine has positive effect on the human mind and can deliver results. Alternative medicine stands on the theory of spiritualism to cure the disease rather than addressing the physical properties and reasons. Alternative medicine is practiced in a number of traditional countries in the Orient region.

Treating cancer with drugs is known as chemotherapy. These anti-cancer drugs are used to kill the cancer cells. Currently cytotoxic drugs are generally referred as to ‘chemotherapy’, affecting the fast dividing cells. Basically the chemotherapy drugs start impeding the cell division. There are many ways this could be achieved, one would be by duplicating the DNA or separating the recently created chromosomes, etc.

Mostly chemotherapy targets all rapidly dividing cells. By doing this it also damages the normal cells, but then the normal cells can repair the DNA damage where as the cancer affected cell cannot. Therefore chemotherapy damages the healthy tissues like the intestinal lining which has a high replacing rate, but eventually they repair themselves. Sometimes certain drug works better in some combination with another drug rather than alone, this is known as combination chemotherapy.

Generally leukemia and lymphoma require a high dosage of chemotherapy with total body irradiation (TBI). The bone marrow is destroyed during this treatment and so is ability of the body to recover. Blood stem cell harvesting is done prior to this cancer treatment so as to allow recovery after the treatment is over. This process is commonly known as autologous stem cell transplantation.

Other than cytotoxic chemotherapy and targeted therapy, Hormonal therapy today is one of the most looked up treatments of cancer. This treatment works by changing the endocrine system by injecting specific hormones in it. These include specifically steroid hormones which hinder the productivity of cancer hormones. The reason for this is that the steroid hormones are strong drivers of gene expression in some cancer cells, thereby changing the specific genes using specific hormones could stop the growth of cancers.

Basically using this cancer treatment the growth of the cancer aimed to be blocked by inducing some hormones. Prostate cancer and breast cancer are examples of hormone sensitive tumors. Therefore estrogen or testosterone either blocked or removed could be an additional treatment to breast and prostate cancers. Cancers that arise from hormone responsive tissue e.g. breast or prostate could be easily treated using hormonal therapy.

Hormonal therapy is also used in certain types of chemotherapy. Oncology is another example where hormonal therapy is used. Here tamoxifen, an estrogen-responsive modulator is used for treating breast cancer. Aromatase inhibitors, a completely another class of hormonal agents are now being used extensively for the treatment of the disease.