Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. While the legitimacy of medical treatments is more and more questioned, one sees a paradoxical increase in nonconventional approaches, notably so in psychiatry. Over time, approaches that were considered valuable by the scientific community were found to be inefficacious, while other approaches, labelled as alternative or complementary, were finally discovered to be useful in a few indications.
From this observation, we propose to classify therapies as orthodox scientifically validated or heterodox scientifically not validated. To illustrate these two categories, we discuss the place, the role, the interest, and also the potential risks of nonconventional approaches in the present practice of psychiatry. Keywords: alternative and complementary medicine , evidence-based medicine , heterodox , orthodox , psychiatry. The power of human imagination has led our ancestors to consider the influence of celestial bodies, spirits, and gods on the horror of diseases and death.
Over millennia, priests, shamans, sacred men, and medicine men helped their peers by predicting their fate and cure on the basis of various rituals, such as examining animal intestines or ingesting diverse compounds. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher wrote of interactions between planets, plants, and animals, and he considered God as the central magnet of all things.
The physician Franz Mesmer extended Kircher's idea into application of the vital principle as a therapy for psychiatric symptoms for which there was then no therapy Figure 1. In the United States, members of the Fox family declared by that their mediumnity was in fact a hoax, which did not stop the appeal of exchanging messages with the dead; only later in the 20 th century did spiritism fall into some disrepute. Frontiers between recognized treatments and charlatanism have long been a theme of discussion, and Louis of Jaucourt wrote about this in the Diderot and d'Alembert Encyclopedia:.
The desire to live is a passion so natural and so strong it is not surprising that those who in health have little or no faith in the skillfulness of an empiric with secrets, appeal nonetheless to this false physician in grave and serious illnesses, the same as those who are drowning cling to the smallest branch.
