Healthcare Systems Flashcards
A medical practice that aims to combat disease through “conventional” means like drugs or surgery.
Allopathy
A 6,000-year-old system of healing originating in India and Nepal.
Ayurveda
A system that uses highly diluted solutions of herbs, minerals, and animal products to promote wellness.
Homeopathy
A holistic medical system that treats health conditions by utilizing what is believed to be the body’s innate ability to heal. Physicians aid healing processes by incorporating a variety of natural methods based on the patient’s individual needs.
Naturopathy
A healthcare system that tends to incorporate various methods of botanical and animal medicines as well as specific ceremonial rituals of the culture to cure disease. The medicinal knowledge is passed from generation to generation primarily through oral traditions. The system tends to be unique to each tribe.
Indigenous or Tribal Medicine
An ancient system of holistic medicine developed in China.
Chinese Medicine
The use of fragrant plants or plant extracts based on the assumption that specific aromas affect the body in different ways.These aromas (essential oils in most cases) are inhaled or applied to the skin in a carrier oil base, such as olive oil or
sweet almond oil.
Aromatherapy
Specially prepared liquid flower extract used to improve psychological wellbeing through energetic and vibrational resonance.
Flower essence
A bitter secretion of the liver that aids digestion, chiefly by saponifying fats.
Bile
The concept that the appearance and/or habitat of a plant indicates its inherent proper ties.
Doctrine of Signatures
An ayurvedic term to describe three energies (vata, pitta, kapha) that circulate in the body and contribute to physical and emotional constitutional tendencies and disease.
Dosha
System of herbalism developed in the United States in the 19th century CE. The Eclectic physicians pulled together herbs and philosophies from various healing
traditions.
Eclectic
An extremely light and volatile concentrated oil extracted from aromatic plants; used in aromatherapy and produced by distillation or chemical extraction.
Essential oil
Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood; historically thought to be fluids contained within the body in this specific theory of Western herbalism.
Four Humors
In Chinese medicine, the life force that governs all creativity and reproduction.
Jing
Ayurvedic dosha associated with dampness and phlegm. Its qualities are heavy, cold, oily, slow, dense, soft, static, and sweet.
Kapha
A body of collected knowledge and description of herbs and their uses.
Materia medica
In homeopathy or flower essences, this is the original preparation that is diluted before consumption.
Mother tincture
A system of herbalism developed by Samuel Thomson in the United States during the 19th century CE.
Physiomedicalism
An ayurvedic dosha associated with fire or bile. Its qualities are light, hot, oily, sharp, liquid, sour, and pungent.
Pitta
A pill, compound, or experience that is similar in appearance to an agent being tested in a clinical trial, but has no direct physiological effect.
Placebo
The perceived healing, improvement of symptoms, or actual healing from a substance or experience that is a placebo.
Placebo response
An herbalist and naturalist who lived from BCE 23-79; author of the Natural History, a work comprised of 37 volumes, of which books XX to XXXll deal with herbs.
Pliny the Elder
A Greek physician of the 1st century CE; his De Materia Medica was the leading text on pharmacology for 16 centuries and details the properties of more than 600 plants
and animal products.
Dioscorides
The ayurvedic concept of vital energy.
Prana
The concept of vital energy in Chinese medicine.
Qi
An ayurvedic dosha associated with wind or air. Its qualities are light, cold, dry, rough, subtle, mobile, clear, and astringent.
Vata
In Chinese medicine, the energetic aspect associated with masculine energy: dry, hot, ascending, exterior.
Yang
In Chinese medicine, the energetic aspect associated with feminine energy: damp, cold, descending, interior.
Yin
A book of herb descriptions and recipes.
Herbal
Any of 20 molecules that are combined to form proteins in living organisms.
Amino acid
The process of absorbing and metabolizing substances.
Assimilation
Proteins secreted by the body that act as catalysts in inducing chemical changes in the body.
Enzymes
Unpaired oxygen molecules that cause cellular damage.
Free radicals
A compound that is created when a sugar binds to a non-sugar molecule.
Glycoside
The tendency of the internal environment of the body to remain relatively constant in spite of varying external conditions.
Homeostasis
