Native American remedies

Claiming to side with nature instead was the distinguishing therapeutic philosophy
of those first alternative systems of practice that appeared in America
in the early 1800s. Systems of practice is specified because while there had
been a variety of methods available as alternatives to conventional medicine
before the nineteenth century, the practitioners of folk medicine, the so-called
root-and-herb doctors, the purveyors of Native American remedies, and other
informally trained medicos had not been professionalized to any significant
degree. They were often paid for their ministrations, to be sure, but they
generally practiced alone, using what knowledge they had acquired in their
individual ways. They did not band together with people of like mind to
prescribe the same drugs and to swear allegiance to the same theory. They
did not establish schools to train the next generation of practitioners, organize
professional societies, or publish journals. The alternative healers who came
onto the scene in the early nineteenth century did all those things, and that
is what made their practices stand out as systems.