The ability for a patient to be counseled on treatment choices when seeking conventional treatment is called Complementary Medicine (CM). A patient’s decision in therapies and services are important as an ethical, political, and moral necessity in the medical world. While providing these people with choice in treatment, it is also necessary to counsel them in the right methods to choose because they may choose treatments that are too costly, unnecessary or not available for the ailment they have.

Sometimes limits occur in the health care choices available to patients, and conflicts are created. Health care resources are often limited to patient decision because of the inability to continuously fund certain kind of diagnostic functions, and conflict arises.

Another issue that arises is that complementary medicine is a service that is paid for outside of medical care, and individuals with lower incomes are not able to afford this service. Most of these sick person are satisfied with CM services which make the inequalities quite unfair. The inequalities of care in the health system should be eliminated if the best interest of the patient is truly the focus. The goal is to make complementary medicine a service in routine care, allowing it to become funded by public funds.

Providing these sick persons with a choice in their treatment options can potentially pose a lot of problems for the medical community, as bad as that sounds. CM is still new in its development, and that does not provide a lot of options for them in terms of the modalities of treatment. There is no hard data that suggests the risks of complementary medicine are numerous, and physicians do not see many risks either, but without additional research and testing, many therapies have not passed that standard.

A patient who uses complementary medicine runs the risk of choosing unproven healing therapies for chronic illness, choosing therapies that are impractically expensive when there are better, less expensive options, or choosing an option purely because they liked it for another ailment although that treatment does not work well for their new illness. With the choice to dismiss conventional therapies altogether in complementary medicine, should the medications that are included on the list for patients to choose from also be unapproved therapies? The answer in conventional medicine would certainly be “no”, as unapproved treatments can be dangerous, and allowing those therapies in the network as a patient?s choice opens the doors for liability.

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