Alternative Medicine Guide: Find the Right Treatment for You

From acupuncture and aromatherapy to reiki and reflexology, you have plenty of options when it comes to integrative therapies. Yet choosing the modalities that will offer the most healing benefits for you can be tricky. Follow this guide to 13 popular treatments to find your alternative-medicine match.

- Meghan Rabitt

Tiffany Caronia lies on her back, fidgets for five seconds, and then slips into Savasana—palms up, legs ever so slightly externally rotated,a gentle smile across her mouth. It’s a pose the 35-year-old vinyasa yoga teacher in Los Angeles knows well, which is why it comes so naturally to her here, on her acupuncturist’s table.

The fact that Caronia is able to quiet her mind and drop any attachment to external senses—the practice of pratyahara, the fifth limb of Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga—is one of the reasons she experiences such great benefits from her acupuncture sessions, says Caronia’s acupuncturist, Maria Villella, LAC, a vinyasa and Ashtanga Yoga teacher in Los Angeles. “With any healing modality, the more you’re able to put yourself in a deeply relaxed state, the more benefits you’ll receive,” says Villella. “I think it has a lot to do with the mind-body connection we develop on our yoga mats.”

Caronia says her trust in Villella is also key: “I truly believe that what Maria does will help me,” she says. There’s scientific proof Caronia is on to something. Researchers are seeing time and again that our expectations of healing play a big role in the psychological and physical benefits we experience. In one recent study published in the journal