---
title: Allopathic medicine
date: 2024-06-27T23:31:03Z
modified: 2025-01-07T16:53:32Z
permalink: "https://elizabethyarnell.com/glossary/allopathic-medicine/"
type: glossary
status: publish
excerpt: ""
wpid: 8363
author: Elizabeth
---

Most people in today’s world are familiar with allopathic doctors who prescribe pharmaceuticals, do surgeries, and promote vaccines. Allopathic doctors staff emergency rooms and hospitals and offer care with the goal of alleviating the discomfort from symptoms of pain or dysfunction by masking or blocking the symptoms.

Allopathic medicine is what is practiced in most conventional hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices.

In allopathic medicine, the practitioner is trained to match symptoms to diagnoses. Then they either treat each condition with a pharmaceutical regimen approved by the official scientific community, or they suggest a surgical procedure. Their goal is to mask or alleviate the patient’s current pain, discomfort, or dysfunction.

Allopathic doctors excel at providing acute care.

Allopathic medicine is increasingly specialized with practitioners becoming highly knowledgeable about one aspect of the human body.

Allopathic doctors are not trained to look for the root causes of pain or discomfort in the way that practitioners of functional medicine do. They are not trained in “lifestyle medicine” and not taught to prescribe lifestyle changes in place of pharmaceuticals. They get extensive training in pharmaceutical-based medicine.