1.
Alternative medicine
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Alternative therapies or diagnoses are not part of medicine or science-based healthcare systems. Contrary to popular belief, significant expense is paid to test alternative medicine, almost none show any effect beyond that of false treatment. Alternative treatments are neither the same as experimental medicine, nor traditional medicine — although the latter, Alternative medicine has grown in popularity and is used by a significant percentage of the population in many countries. While it has rebranded itself, from quackery to complementary or integrative medicine—it promotes essentially the same practices. Newer proponents often suggest alternative medicine be used together with medical treatment. Despite being illegal to market alternative therapies for treatment in most of the developed world. Alternative therapies are based on religion, tradition, superstition, belief in supernatural energies, pseudoscience, errors in reasoning, propaganda, fraud. Regulation and licensing of alternative medicine and health care providers varies between and within countries, Alternative medicine is criticized for being based on misleading statements, quackery, pseudoscience, antiscience, fraud, or poor scientific methodology. Promoting alternative medicine has been called dangerous and unethical, testing alternative medicine that has no scientific basis has been called a waste of scarce research resources. It has been suggested that the very idea of any alternative treatment that works is paradoxical. Practitioners of complementary medicine usually discuss and advise patients as to available alternative therapies, patients often express interest in mind-body complementary therapies because they offer a non-drug approach to treating some health conditions. In addition to the underpinnings of the popularity of alternative medicine. One of the most critical is the placebo effect—a well-established observation in medicine, CAMs popularity may be related to other factors that Edzard Ernst mentioned in an interview in The Independent, Why is it so popular, then. Ernst blames the providers, customers and the doctors whose neglect, there are 40 million websites and 39.9 million tell lies, sometimes outrageous lies. They mislead cancer patients, who are encouraged not only to pay their last penny, at the same time, people are gullible. It needs gullibility for the industry to succeed and it doesnt make me popular with the public, but its the truth. An analysis of the reasons why this is so points towards the relationship as a key factor. Providers of CAM tend to build better therapeutic relationships than mainstream healthcare professionals, in turn, this implies that much of the popularity of CAM is a poignant criticism of the failure of mainstream healthcare
2.
Reiki
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Reiki is a form of alternative medicine developed in 1922 by Japanese Buddhist Mikao Usui. Since originating in Japan, Reiki has been adapted into varying cultural traditions across the world and it is based on qi, which practitioners say is a universal life force, although there is no empirical evidence that such a life force exists. Clinical research has not shown Reiki to be effective as a treatment for any medical condition. The American Cancer Society, Cancer Research UK, and the National Center for Complementary, the earliest recorded English usage dates to 1975. The Japanese reiki is commonly written as レイキ in katakana syllabary or as 霊気 in shinjitai new character form kanji and it compounds the words rei and ki. Spirits, ones feelings, mood, frame of mind, temperament, temper, disposition, ones nature, character, mind to do something, intention, will, care, attention, precaution. Some reiki translation equivalents from Japanese-English dictionaries are, feeling of mystery, an atmosphere of mystery, and an ethereal atmosphere, besides the usual Sino-Japanese pronunciation reiki, these kanji 霊気 have an alternate Japanese reading, namely ryōge, meaning demon, ghost. Chinese língqì 靈氣 was first recorded in the Neiye Inward Training section of the Guanzi and that mysterious vital energy within the mind, One moment it arrives, the next it departs. So fine, there is nothing within it, so vast and we lose it because of the harm caused by mental agitation. Modern Standard Chinese língqì is translated by Chinese-English dictionaries as, spiritual influence or atmosphere,1, supernatural power or force in fairy tales, miraculous power or force, and 1. According to the inscription on his stone, Usui taught his system of Reiki to more than 2,000 people during his lifetime. While teaching Reiki in Fukuyama, Usui suffered a stroke and died on 9 March 1926, Reikis teachings and adherents claim that qi is physiological and can be manipulated to treat a disease or condition. The existence of qi has not been established by medical research, therefore, Reiki is a pseudoscientific theory based on metaphysical concepts. The existence of the mechanism for Reiki – qi or life force energy – has not been established. Most research on Reiki is poorly designed and prone to bias, there is no reliable empirical evidence that Reiki is helpful for treating any medical condition, although some physicians have said it might help promote general well-being. In 2011, William T. Jarvis of The National Council Against Health Fraud stated that there is no evidence that clinical Reikis effects are due to anything other than suggestion or the placebo effect. Evaluating these claims scientific skeptic author Brian Dunning reported. his aura, his qi, none of these have any counterpart in the physical world. Although she attempted to describe their properties as heat or magnetism, there are no properties attributable to the mysterious field she describes, thus it cannot be authoritatively said to exist
3.
Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
4.
Mokichi Okada
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Mokichi Okada was the founder of the Church of World Messianity, in which he is known by the honorific title Meishū-sama. He is also the founder of Johrei, a ritual that claims to use divine light to dissolve the spiritual impurities that are the source of all physical, emotional. According to his biography, Okada was born to a poor family in Tokyo and, after many trials and tribulations. Initially a follower of Shinto offshoot Oomoto, Okada claimed to have received a revelation from God in 1926. Okada soon expanded to open a rehabilitation center centering on the powers of light. The Sangetsu school of ikebana, inspired by Mokichi Okada, was founded in June 1972, much of Okadas extensive art collection is now housed in the MOA Museum of Art in Atami, Japan. In 1936, Okada established a system originally called, no fertilizer farming or Nature Farming. Offshoots such as the Sekai Kyusei Kyo, promoting Kyusei nature farming, vegetables and fruits produced by nature farming taste better than those by chemical farming. Masanobu Fukuoka Organic farming No-till farming MOA International Home Page
5.
Bodhisattva
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Bodhisattvas are a popular subject in Buddhist art. In early Indian Buddhism, the term bodhisattva was primarily used to specifically to Gautama Buddha in his former life. The Jataka tales, which are the stories of the Buddhas past lives, depict the various attempts of the bodhisattva to embrace qualities like self-sacrifice, mount Potalaka, for example, is one of Bodhisattvayana. Because Hinayana was disliked and the terms Śrāvaka-Bodhisattva or Pratyekabuddha-Bodhisattva were not widely used, nevertheless, bodhisattva retained an implied reference to someone on the path to become an arhat or pratyekabuddha. In contrast, the goal of Mahayanas bodhisattva path is to achieve Samyaksambodhiṃ, when, during his discourses, he recounts his experiences as a young aspirant, he regularly uses the phrase When I was an unenlightened bodhisatta. The term therefore connotes a being who is bound for enlightenment, in other words, in the Pāli canon, the bodhisatta is also described as someone who is still subject to birth, illness, death, sorrow, defilement, and delusion. Some of the lives of the Buddha as a bodhisattva are featured in the Jataka tales. According to the Theravāda monk Bhikkhu Bodhi, the path is not taught in the earliest strata of Buddhist texts such as the Pali Nikayas which instead focus on the ideal of the Arahant. In later Theravada literature, the bodhisatta is used fairly frequently in the sense of someone on the path to liberation. He also quotes an inscription from the 10th Century king of Sri Lanka, Mahinda IV, paul Williams writes that some modern Theravada meditation masters in Thailand are popularly regarded as bodhisattvas. Like perhaps some of the early Mahāyāna forest hermit monks, or the later Buddhist Tantrics and they are widely revered, worshipped, and held to be arhats or bodhisattvas. Mahāyāna Buddhism is based principally upon the path of a bodhisattva, according to Jan Nattier, the term Mahāyāna was originally even an honorary synonym for Bodhisattvayāna, or the Bodhisattva Vehicle. The Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra contains a simple and brief definition for the term bodhisattva and this definition is given as the following. Because he has enlightenment as his aim, a bodhisattva-mahāsattva is so called, the early Rastrapalapariprccha sutra also promotes a solitary life of meditation in the forests, far away from the distractions of the householder life. The Rastrapala is also critical of monks living in monasteries and in cities who are seen as not practicing meditation. These texts seem to indicate the initial Bodhisattva ideal was associated with a strict forest asceticism, Mahāyāna Buddhism encourages everyone to become bodhisattvas and to take the bodhisattva vows. With these vows, one makes the promise to work for the enlightenment of all sentient beings by practicing the six perfections. Indelibly entwined with the vow is merit transference
6.
Vitalism
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A Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the vital spark, energy or élan vital, which some equate with the soul. Vitalism has a history in medical philosophies, most traditional healing practices posited that disease results from some imbalance in vital forces. In the Western tradition founded by Hippocrates, these forces were associated with the four temperaments and humours. One example of a notion in Africa is the Yoruba concept of ase. Today forms of vitalism continue to exist as philosophical positions or a tenet in many religious traditions, the notion that bodily functions are due to a vitalistic principle existing in all living creatures has roots going back at least to ancient Egypt. In Greek philosophy, the Milesian school proposed natural explanations deduced from materialism and mechanism, however, by the time of Lucretius, this account was supplemented, and in stoic physics, the pneuma assumed the role of logos. Galen believed the lungs draw pneuma from the air, which the blood communicates throughout the body and this debate was to persist throughout the ancient world. Atomistic mechanism got a shot in the arm from Epicurus, while the Stoics adopted a divine teleology. The choice seems simple, either show how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes, in Europe, medieval physics was influenced by the idea of pneuma, helping to shape later aether theories. Jöns Jakob Berzelius, one of the early 19th century fathers of modern chemistry, vitalist chemists predicted that organic materials could not be synthesized from inorganic components, but Friedrich Wöhler synthesised urea from inorganic components in 1828. However, contemporary accounts do not support the belief that vitalism died when Wöhler made urea. Vitalism has long been regarded in the community as a corrupting pseudoscientific influence. Vitalism today is no longer philosophically and scientifically viable, and is used as a pejorative epithet. Ernst Mayr wrote, It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists, the logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable. Vitalism has become so disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive today would want to be classified as a vitalist. Still, the remnants of vitalist thinking can be found in the work of Alistair Hardy, Sewall Wright, and Charles Birch, louis Pasteur after his famous rebuttal of spontaneous generation, performed several experiments that he felt supported vitalism. According to Bechtel, Pasteur fitted fermentation into a general programme describing special reactions that only occur in living organisms. Rejecting the claims of Berzelius, Liebig, Traube and others that fermentation resulted from chemical agents or catalysts within cells, other vitalists included English anatomist Francis Glisson and the Italian doctor Marcello Malpighi
7.
Energy (esotericism)
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The term energy is used by writers and practitioners of various esoteric forms of spirituality and alternative medicine to refer to a variety of phenomena. There is no evidence for the existence of such energy. Therapies that purport to use, modify, or manipulate unknown energies are thus among the most contentious of all complementary, claims related to energy therapies are most often anecdotal, rather than being based on repeatable empirical evidence. Concepts such as force and élan vital emerged from the debate over vitalism in the early 20th century. As biologists studied embryology and developmental biology, particularly before the discovery of genes, german biologist Hans Driesch, proposed entelechy, an energy which he believed controlled organic processes. However such ideas are discredited and modern science has all but abandoned the attempt to associate additional energetic properties with life. According to Brian Dunning, the term energy is, in fact, misused in the context of spirituality and alternative medicine, Thats all that energy is. But in popular culture, energy has become a noun. Energy is often spoken of as if it is a thing unto itself, like a region of glowing power, when you hear the word energy used, substitute the phrase measurable work capability. Does the usage still make sense, remember, energy itself is not the thing being measured, energy is the measurement of work performed or of potential. Thus, this New Age concept of the body having a field is fatally doomed. There is no such thing as a field, they are two unrelated concepts. Despite the lack of support, spiritual writers and thinkers have maintained ideas about energy. The field of energy medicine purports to manipulate energy, but there is no evidence to support this. The concept of qi appears throughout traditional East Asian culture, such as in the art of feng shui, qi philosophy also includes the notion of negative qi, typically understood as introducing negative moods like outright fear or more moderate expressions like social anxiety or awkwardness. Deflecting this negative qi through geomancy is a preoccupation in feng shui, the traditional explanation of acupuncture states that it works by manipulating the circulation of qi through a network of meridians. There are various sacred sites that people of various belief systems find numinous or having an energy with significance to humans
8.
Egalitarianism
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Egalitarianism – or equalitarianism – is a trend of thought that favors equality for all people. Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status, some sources define egalitarianism as the point of view that equality reflects the natural state of humanity. Common forms of egalitarianism include political and philosophical, the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, as the rest of the Constitution, in its operative language uses the term person, stating, for example, that. Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, an example of this form is the Tunisian Constitution of 2014 which provides that men and women shall be equal in their rights and duties. The motto Liberté, égalité, fraternité was used during the French Revolution and is used as an official motto of the French government. The 1789 Rights of Man and of the Citizen French Constitution is framed also with this basis in rights of men. This was satirized by Olympe de Gouges during this time with her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. The Declaration of Independence of the United States is an example of an assertion of equality of men, John Locke is sometimes considered the founder of this form. Many state constitutions in the US also use rights of man rather than rights of person. See, e. g. the Kentucky State Constitution, at a cultural level, egalitarian theories have developed in sophistication and acceptance during the past two hundred years. Several egalitarian ideas enjoy wide support among intellectuals and in the populations of many countries. Whether any of these ideas have been implemented in practice, however. A position of opposition to egalitarianism is antiegalitarianism, although the economist Karl Marx is sometimes mistaken to be an egalitarian, Marx eschewed normative theorizing on moral principles altogether. Marx did, however, have a theory of the evolution of moral principles in relation to economic systems. The American economist John Roemer has put forth a new perspective of equality, Roemer concludes that egalitarians must reject socialism as it is classically defined in order for equality to be realized. Sikhism The Sikh faith was founded upon egalitarian principles, going beyond most faiths to provide equality not only based upon race, within the wide range of Christianity, there are dissenting views to this from opposing groups, some of which are Complementarians and Patriarchalists. There are also those who may say that, whilst the Bible encourages equality, it also encourages law and order and these ideas are considered by some to be contrary to the ideals of egalitarianism. Various Christian groups have attempted to hold to this view and develop Christian oriented communities, in Acts, chapter 4, members of the early Christian community sell their possessions, give the proceeds to a common fund overseen by the disciples, then take according to their need
9.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
