Traditional & Alternative Medicine

ISSUE: Widespread applications of Botox® have led to the necessity to reconsider how we evaluate nature and risks of therapies Western Medicine provides. Th ere is need for leadership skills such as critical thinking and looking at the broader picture to ask if a given procedure is the best option available. In non-public healthcare, revenue concerns can be a driving consideration when the reason we exist is to provide necessary protection and care when and where required. In academia, “publish or perish” is the necessary law to maintain tenures and leadership, hence focused on providing volumes of technical papers not always neutral. Such practices focused towards “making the numbers” over time have slowly created a state of lull and disconnect from the original purpose of healthcare professions. Peer-reviewed studies show an 8% rate for Botox® fatal aft ermaths, while increasingly provided for non-medically indicated cosmetic procedures. How do we justify lethal risk and life-threatening incapacitation for such therapy? Botox® is also being used for brain conditions such as post-concussion headache and depression where causative mechanisms are not yet elucidated. Botox® side-eff ects risk management need reconsidering how such protocol should be pursued. Proposal: As professionals, it is time to develop leadership and critical thinking such as asking the right questions, like whether a given procedure is the best to “Do No Harm? Are there other therapeutic options to achieve similar objectives with less risk by broadening our view? For example, Eastern Medicine provides eff ective innocuous techniques to address conditions such as muscle spasticity.