How does Traditional Medicine Supplement Current Orthopaedic Practice and Rehabilitation?

Abstract

Orthopaedic practice has gained impressive advancements in the past decades and the most important achievements have been made after the two world wars, when the need for injury and fracture treatment was urgent and vast. Orthopaedic experts of today, might not realize that “Bone setting” used to be the main service provided to skeletal injuries and fractures. “Bone setters” have their special techniques and therapeutic agents (mostly topical) to ensure satisfactory results. They also provide various techniques for the control of pain and to facilitate recovering, i.e. rehabilitation. Although the old traditional techniques have been replaced by modern hospital practice, they remain popular outside the hospital and specialist clinics because patients are in favour of additional treatment measures so that pain is better controlled, and healing and recovery could be quicker. This review selected three important areas of Traditional Medicine that should contribute towards modern Orthopaedic Practice and discusses about the scientific evaluations being done to give evidence to those practices. It will be appropriate for the orthopaedic experts to get acquainted with the apparently unscientific traditional practices and consider making use of them under appropriate situations.