According to a World Health Organization, there are 250,000 practitioners of traditional medicine in the Philippines. Natural medicine users have been growing ever since the Traditional and Alternative Medicine Act of 1997 (or Tama) was implemented. Because of this, the country has been majorly supporting the use of alternative medicine, and is more inclined towards it over the latter years.
There are a lot of advantages to herbal medicine, according to Health Guidance. It’s a lot less cheap than most synthetic medicine and it’s also very easily attainable. Most, if not all, herbal medicines are mostly considered over-the-counter medicine, which do not need any doctor’s prescription to buy it. These alternative medicines also don’t really have serious side-effects and are mainly promoting general wellness.
Steven Salzberg, a prominent biology researcher at University of Maryland, calls alternative medicine as “cleverly marketed, dangerous quackery”.
He even said that “the more time they spend getting fraudulent treatments, the less time they’ll spend getting treatments that work and that could save their lives.”
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