Alternative medicine methods may incorporate or base themselves on traditional medicine [1], folk knowledge [2], spiritual beliefs, or newly conceived approaches to healing. The major complementary and alternative medicine systems have many common characteristics, treating the whole person, including a focus on individualizing treatments, promoting self-care and self-healing, and recognizing the spiritual nature of each individual. Complementary and alternative medicine often lacks or has only limited experimental and clinical study. However, scientific investigation of these methods is beginning to address this knowledge gap.    There are some systems of alternative medicine: Traditional Chinese Medicine (based on five elements and acupuncture);Ayurveda (Indian traditional Medicine based on the mind-body-spirit connection); Homeopathy (European traditional Medicine based on the ancient law of similar); Naturopathy (a system that is based on the precepts of a medical regimen of hydrotherapy, exercise, fresh air, sunlight, and herbal remedies). All these systems include special techniques. One of the most wide-spread of them is herbal medicine. Herbal medicine is called botanical medicine or phytomedicine. It refers to using a plant's seeds, berries, roots, leaves, flowers or bark for medicinal purposes. Whole herbs contain many ingredients, and they may work together to produce a beneficial effect. Many factors determine how effective a herb may be. For example, the type of environment (climate, soil quality, microbes) in which a plant is grown, harvested and processed will by all means affect it. Herbal supplements, unlike prescription drugs, can be sold without being tested to prove they are safe and effective. However, herbal supplements must be made according to good manufacturing practices.Herbal medicine is used to treat many conditions, such as asthma, eczema, premenstrual syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, menopausal symptoms, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer and so on. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_medicine[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_remedy
Ruban A.S., Rodioniva T.V. Herbal medicine among complementary and alternative medicine methods // Бюллетень медицинских Интернет-конференций, Vol. 2, Issue 11, 2012, pp. 846-846

The use of drug substances derived from plants, fungi, bacteria, and marine organisms are ‘‘Mother Nature Gift’’ for diseases of mankind. Many of these are discovered serendipitously and have a long tradition in medicine. Till date, the use of natural products, their semisynthetic and synthetic derivatives have been mostly confined to their ethnic use. But it has been well known that each substance has a wide spectrum of biological activities as evident from some new uses of many old drugs. PASS (Prediction of Activity Spectra for Substances) has been employed as a strong potential tool to predict the biological activity spectrum of synthetic substances for the discovery of new drugs. But the potential of PASS to predict the biological activity spectra of natural products is still underestimated. The present study was therefore undertaken to investigate and correlate the biological activity spectrum of the main phytoconstituent of some selected Indian medicinal plants with their reported biological activities in order to evaluate the applicability of PASS. Further, the unexplored but PASS-predicted activities having good activity score (Pa>0.7) for particular structure were listed as hidden potential of the plant.
Med. Chem. Res., 2011, 20 (9), 1509-1514.