The Potency of Complementary-Alternative Medicine (CAM) to Improve Reproductive Health of Indonesian Women

Abstract

Nowadays more and more people begin to know and use Complementary-Alternative Medicine (CAM) as one option to improve their health. CAM is a non-conventional treatment that includes promotive, preventive, curative, and rehabilitative. It is not only in developing country like Indonesia, but also in developed countries can be found the increasing use of CAM. For the examples are the escalation by 48% in Australia, 70% in Canada, 42% in America, 38% in Belgium, and 75% in France. Various scientific studies about CAM’s benefit made more women use CAM to improve their reproductive health. Based on the previous studies, authors did the literature review and it could be concluded that CAM effective in overcome several reproductive problems, for examples: vaginal wet mount, missed period, pain during menstruation, menopause, increasing the fertility, breast cancer, as well as care period of pregnancy and childbirth. The potential of CAM towards improving woman reproductive health is discussed in-depth within this paper. From the literature review, it can be summarized that it is very important to preserve CAM because the potencies in improving reproductive health of Indonesian women.