Complementary and alternative approaches share a belief in the body’s ability to heal itself. Some of them use an understanding of the working of the body which is not studied by practitioners of conventional medicine, based on Eastern understandings of energy meridians and fields.
Usually such treatments are tailored to the individual, and do not use a ‘one size fits all’ approach. This means that they are rarely tested by conventional randomised controlled trials, and therefore are not regarded as ‘evidence-based’, and so few of them are recommended by the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) or available on the NHS.